The State Department is hip to the fact that jihadists are using social media to propagandize and recruit supporters, and its $5 million Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications is devoted to fighting back. The trouble, as Jacob Silverman reveals, is that they’re not very good at it:
The way the program works is fairly simple: The State Department’s analysts follow online chatter about the latest ISIL victory or news of a recent al-Shabaab massacre in Kenya, and then they try to insert themselves into the conversation. The idea is less to sway committed terrorists than to persuade fence-sitters not to join up or provide material support.
But State’s messages usually arrive with all the grace of someone’s dad showing up at a college party. The posts tend to be blunt, adversarial, and plagued by poor Photoshop work.
Typically, “Think Again Turn Away,” as the CSCC’s English-language Twitter account calls itself, delivers hectoring messages written in the schoolmarmish tone of Reagan-era “Just Say No” commercials – only this time it is terrorism, not drugs, they’re trying to scare everyone away from. And because the government’s tweeting is so flat and self-serious, few people—even those most sympathetic to its messaging—are motivated to share the CSCC’s posts. As anyone bidding for attention on social media knows, that’s a serious problem.
ISIL supporters, by contrast, can be playful and droll, though sometimes the humor is exceedingly macabre and only appeals to a certain sensibility. Many of the photos being circulated — such as one of a dead Shiite man floating in a body of water, alongside a joke about him being taught to scuba dive — are horrific, but they also make for popular jihadist memes. (That particular picture was retweeted nine times and favorited 15.) The plain fact is that, for now, groups like ISIL are far more sophisticated than the State Department in their messaging.
Previous Dish on ISIS’s social media campaigns here, here, and here.
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