h/t OMFG @Moon of Alabama
Under the fairly bland headline “Social media battle augments Iraq bloodshed”, Doug Gross of CNN states:
As ISIS’ fight has moved from Syria to Iraq, that savvy Web strategy has expanded to include online video posts much slicker than the grainy, shaky clips that have popped up from AQ and other terror groups. Recently, a slickly-produced hour-long ISIS video titled “The Clanging of the Swords” surfaced, showcasing killings, roadside bombings and other acts of terror for which ISIS claimed credit.
The video vividly displays these scenes in a style reminiscent of Hollywood efforts like “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” complete with elaborate aerial shots. Nadia Oweidat, a Middle East analyst at New America Foundation, said:
“This is funded. This is geopolitics. There is money behind it. It’s not just idiots. These idiots have somebody controlling them and providing them with equipment that is very expensive. You can’t just get it in a cave.”
On another front, at least one analyst says ISIS was recently using a mobile app made available in Google’s Play Store to inflate its presence on social media. Called The Dawn of Glad Tidings, or just Dawn, the app was promoted as a way to keep up to date with news from ISIS.
According to J M Berger, editor of national-security blog IntelWire, the Dawn app would post updates to users’ Twitter feeds. By mid-afternoon Tuesday, Google appeared to have removed the app from its store. Google did not immediately reply to a message seeking comment for this story.
(The Atlantic) – 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 …
…
The app is just one way ISIL 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.
- ○ The Bearers Of Glad Tidings – Anwar al Awlaki
○ We’re fighting al Qaeda like a terrorist group, they’re fighting us as an army.
