After the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants publicized al Qaeda’s beliefs, demands, and atrocities with a succession of crudely produced audio and videotapes sent to Al Jazeera and other networks. But during the Iraq war, the way that news and ideas were communicated started changing. The elite reporters and editors who decided what news was and how it would be presented were being challenged by social media without hierarchy or filters.
Launched in 2004, the social networking site Facebook was followed a year later by YouTube, a seemingly infinite repository of videos living forever in the cloud. Then came Twitter, a real-time messaging service offering a global audience to those with something to say who could say it briefly. These and other technologies meant that an anonymous jihadist with a laptop could reach as many people as the world’s leading newspapers combined. By 2007, when smartphones started becoming popular, he didn’t even need a laptop.
Osama bin Laden recognized the power of social media early. “[T]he wide-scale spread of Jihadist ideology, especially on the Internet, and the tremendous number of young people who frequent the Jihadist websites—a major achievement for Jihad,” he wrote in a 2010 letter discovered by Seal Team Six inside his Abbottabad compound.
Today, thousands of jihadists prowl the web promoting their brand of Salafist Islam while trying to persuade young Muslims to travel to Syria and Iraq. Teens curious about the Islamic State can go to Ask.fm, where questions about sharia will be answered promptly in English by British jihadists their age. Tumblr, a blogging site, hosts essays on how to build and position IEDs. Those turned off by videos of crucifixions and beheadings can head to Instagram to see terrorists handing out bread, sweeping the streets, and playing with kittens. When sensitive information like how to travel to Syria and whom to contact upon arrival needs to be exchanged, ISIS bloggers communicate with prospective recruits via private messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Kik, Paltalk, and Telegram.
In theory, it’s easy to monitor the text traffic of ISIS sympathizers using salience analysis. Lexalytics is a Boston company whose cloud-based sentiment and intent analysis software can process hundreds of millions of documents a day to understand what people using social media are thinking. In the hands of a social media management company like Sprinklr, Lexalytics software can parse the digital zeitgeist for an airline, hotel company, or government security office. “We process the equivalent of the entire Twitter stream several times a day to know what’s trending,” says Lexalytics CEO Jeff Catlin. “The Boston Globe uses our product to analyze the changing sentiments of New Hampshire voters.”
ISIS manages to avoid analysis of sensitive communications because of Tails (the Amnesic Incognito Live System) and TOR, two complementary operating systems that encrypt files, emails, and instant messages so that locations and browsing habits remain anonymous. The NSA describes the programs, which are open source and freely downloadable, as “major” threats to its mission and potentially “catastrophic” when used with other privacy tools. It does not mention that TOR, which keeps identities secret by bouncing communications around a network of relays, was developed by the U.S. Navy Research Laboratory and enhanced by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency inside the Department of Defense.
According to a Twitter census compiled last March by the Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, ISIS supporters operate between 46,000 and 70,000 Twitter accounts, with an average of 1,000 followers each—far higher than the typical average of around 200 followers. Several security companies believe ISIS sends out more than 90,000 messages a day. About 20 percent of terrorist messaging is in English, the language used by Huda Muthawny, an Alabama woman who targets Muslim girls in the United States with the message that the “caliphate” is a utopian state where they will find status and belonging.
ISIS YouTube videos are horrific, but its messaging on Facebook and Instagram is weirdly compelling. Steely-eyed soldiers in tailored fatigues almost look daring as they vow to accept martyrdom. By contrast, Washington’s counterterrorism program called “Think Again, Turn Away” features blurry photos, jumbled typefaces, and inept prose.
“I know something about memes,” Cory Booker (D-N.J.) sputtered at a meeting last summer of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. “Look at their fancy memes compared to what we’re not doing.” In a rare show of bipartisanship, committee chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) was in full agreement on ISIS messaging. “We invented the social network sites,” he said. “We’ve got Hollywood. We’ve got the capabilities to blow these guys out of the water from the standpoint of communications.”
The Obama administration created the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications in 2010, but Ambassador Alberto Fernandez, its former coordinator, concedes his operation was underfunded, unfocused, and unsuccessful. “Our goal was to discover what terrorists were saying on social media, but we had no mandate to take things down,” he admits, adding that his entire budget for three years was less than the cost of one drone. Now a vice president at the Middle East Muslim Research Institute, Fernandez says the administration didn’t take ISIS messaging seriously. After the death of bin Laden, Obama thought jihadist terrorism was yesterday’s news. “His ‘JV team’ remark reflected that point of view. Washington ties itself in knots about metadata and the black stuff, but terrorist propaganda is all in plain sight. The government just needs the will to engage.”
Some Muslim hackers aim to embarrass ISIS supporters by destroying their digital infrastructure or “doxing” (revealing) their identities. But others prefer to change the conversation by creating new memes. Affinis Labs in Northern Virginia sponsored hackathons in Abu Dhabi and Sydney in 2015 and will host four more this month, in Uganda, California, London, and Marrakesh. The goal is to devise mobile apps and websites that communicate Islam’s true values in a way that resonates with young people.
“Countering ISIS’s revolutionary fervor with passionate moderation doesn’t work,” declares Affinis cofounder Shahed Amanullah, who refuses government assistance despite his former job as a Department of State adviser in charge of digital diplomacy to young Muslims around the world. “We’re more effective working with communities without the government in the back seat or even in the car.”
Shahed believes the San Bernardino massacre made ISIS’s evil tangible and roused America’s roughly three million Muslims to the idea that their youth must be empowered, not embattled. Toward that end, Affinis is incubating 11 startups and mobile applications supporting mainstream living in opposition to radicalism. ComeBack2Us is a digital underground railroad being developed for people who want to leave Syria and return home. It contains a message service for families to communicate with a son or daughter pondering a break from ISIS. Ishqr is an online dating site for millennial American Muslims who want to keep the faith yet avoid arranged marriages. LaunchGood is a faith-based online crowdfunding platform in Detroit supporting Muslim entrepreneurs in 20 countries. The company calls itself a “Global Force for Good”; it raised $100,000 for eight black Southern churches destroyed by fire after the nine murders in Charleston, S.C., last year.
LaunchGood CEO Chris Abdur-Rahman Blauvelt, 31, was raised a Presbyterian in Michigan and converted to Islam 15 years ago. He doesn’t believe anti-ISIS fatwas from elderly religious scholars have much effect on terrorism. “We need to meet the youth where they are—online and in social media,” he says. “The world’s largest Muslim community is not Indonesia. It is the community of Muslims who are gathering online and exchanging ideas.”
The flow of misguided youths to Syria is far from over, but American Muslims are trying to take back the Internet. AverageMohamed.com is an animated comic for children developed by a 40-year-old Somali-American gas station owner in Minneapolis. Cartoons on the site denounce suicide bombs, slavery, ISIS beheadings, and the Paris attacks and end with the slogan: “Peace up—extremist thinking out.” Another web program preaching multicultural peace is Shakes & Shaykhs, a series of YouTube videos similar to Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Produced by Ali Baluch, a 26-year-old Afghan-American videographer, the 26-minute conversations in coffee shops mix Islamic precepts with observations on American dating and television shows.
The soldiers in America’s digital war on ISIS are tech-savvy millennials like Ali Ashraf Jakvani, 24, a social media expert who divides his time between California and Oman. Asked if American Muslims can defeat ISIS terrorists in the fight for youth, he smiles and nods. “This phone is a weapon,” he says, “and it is more powerful than any gun.”
East-West News Service editor David DeVoss spent more than four years in Iraq working for USAID development programs.
