How ISIS Games TwitterThe militant group that conquered northern Iraq is deploying a

sophisticated social-media strategy. J.M. BERGERJUN 16 2014, 2:00 PM ETTweet MoreEmailPrint

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The advance of an army used to be marked by war drums. Now

it’s marked by volleys of tweets.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni militant

group that seized Iraq’s second-largest city last week and is

now pledging to take Baghdad, has honed this new technique

—most recently posting photos on Twitter of an alleged mass

killing of Iraqi soldiers. But what’s often overlooked in press

coverage is that ISIS doesn’t just have strong, organic support

online. It also employs social-media strategies that inflate and

control its message. Extremists of all stripes are increasingly

using social media to recruit, radicalize and raise funds, and

ISIS is one of the most adept practitioners of this approach.

One of ISIS's more successful ventures is an Arabic-language

Twitter app called The Dawn of Glad Tidings, or just Dawn.

The app, an official ISIS product promoted by its top users, is

advertised as a way to keep up on the latest news about the

jihadi group.

Hundreds of users have signed up for the app on the web or on

their Android phones through the Google Play store. When you

download the app, ISIS asks for a fair amount of personal data:

J.M. Berger

Once you sign up, the app will post tweets to your account—

the content of which is decided by someone in ISIS’s social-

media operation. The tweets include links, hashtags, and

images, and the same content is also tweeted by the accounts

of everyone else who has signed up for the app, spaced out to

avoid triggering Twitter’s spam-detection algorithms. Your

Twitter account functions normally the rest of the time,

allowing you to go about your business.

Tweets Sent by ISIS's Social-Media App Over a 2-Hour Period

J.M. Berger

The app first went into wide use in April 2014, but its posting

activity has ramped up during the group’s latest offensive,

reaching an all-time high of almost 40,000 tweets in one day as

ISIS marched into the northern Iraqi city of Mosul last week.

On Sunday, as the media reported on the group’s advance

toward Baghdad, hundreds of Dawn app users began sending

thousands of tweets featuring an image of an armed jihadist

gazing at the ISIS flag flying over the city, with the text, “We

are coming, Baghdad” (see below).

The volume of these tweets was enough to make any search

for “Baghdad” on Twitter generate the image among its first

results, which is certainly one means of intimidating the city’s

residents. 

J.M. Berger

The app is just one way ISIS games Twitter to magnify its

message. Another is the use of organized hashtag campaigns,

in which the group enlists hundreds and sometimes thousands

of activists to repetitively tweet hashtags at certain times of

day so that they trend on the social network. This approach

also skews the results of a popular Arabic Twitter account

called @ActiveHashtags that tweets each day’s top trending

tags. When ISIS gets its hashtag into the @ActiveHashtags

stream, it results in an average of 72 retweets per tweet,

which only makes the hashtag trend more. As it gains traction,

more users are exposed to ISIS’s messaging. The group’s

supporters also run accounts similar to @ActiveHashtags that

exclusively feature jihadi content and can produce hundreds of

retweets per tweet. 

ISIS uses hashtags to focus-group messaging and branding

concepts.

As a result of these strategies, and others, ISIS is able to

project strength and promote engagement online. For

instance, the ISIS hashtag consistently outperforms that of the

group’s main competitor in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, even

though the two groups have a similar number of supporters

online. In data I analyzed in February, ISIS often registered

more than 10,000 mentions of its hashtag per day, while the

number of al-Nusra mentions generally ranged between 2,500

and 5,000.

ISIS also uses hashtags to focus-group messaging and

branding concepts, much like a Western corporation might.

Earlier this year, ISIS hinted, without being specific, that it

was planning to change the name of its organization. Activists

then carefully promoted a hashtag crafted to look like a

grassroots initiative, demanding that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-

Baghdadi declare not an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq, but

the rebirth of an Islamic caliphate. The question of when and

how to declare a new caliphate is highly controversial in jihadi

circles, and the hashtag produced a great deal of angry and

divisive discussion, which ISIS very likely tracked and

measured. It never announced a name change.

Media attention has focused, not unreasonably, on ISIS’s use

of social media to spread pictures of graphic violence, attract

new fighters, and incite lone wolves. But it’s important to

recognize that these activities are supported by sophisticated

online machinery. ISIS does have legitimate support online—

but less than it might seem. And it owes a lot of that support to

a calculated campaign that would put American social-media-

marketing gurus to shame. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/isis-iraq-twitter-social-media-strategy/372856/