Lost amid the first excitement over the Twitter revolutions of the Arab spring was a simple fact that Twitter, just like any other social network, is an ideologically non committed medium. It can be used to instigated absolutely everything from animal rights movements to white supremacist groups. Twitter is a general purpose destabilization tool. It doesn't play favorites. And it can serve as a recruitment tool for anti government militias in America just as well as it does for anti American jihadists in the Middle East.
The day the Western society wakes up to the dangers of social media... It will be probably too late.
# Financial Times
Jihad by social media () {
Date = March 28, 2014
By = Sam Jones
(...)
“If the Gulf was the first televised war, this is the first tweeted war,” says Jonathan Russell, liaison officer at the Quilliam Foundation, a British think-tank that aims to combat Islamist extremism. “Gone are the days when you had to go to a certain problematic mosque and meet a hate preacher. There are stories of guys just following events on Twitter, or just sending messages to people over there, and then booking an easyJet flight to Turkey.”
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If Twitter is a vehicle for self-expression, its darker side – in the context of radical Islamism and of jihad in Syria – is its power as a recruiting tool. All the jihadis the FT communicated with were very conscious of the fact. “It’s important for people to see the real picture, directly from the ground,” one fighter from Holland wrote – so that others will join the fight. Many said their tweeting was like “Da’wa”, which means “preaching” in Arabic and is the term used to describe proselytising Islam. There are no parade-ground calls-to-arms on the Twitter feeds or video uploads of most jihadis, just young fighters posting pictures of themselves in the desert and revelling in their own sense of purpose and community.
“In many ways, Syria has revolutionised the jihadist use of PR and the jihadis’ use of information – the dominance of social media to communicate, stay connected, provide statements – and for people to have their own accounts has been profound,” says Charles Lister, a Doha-based terrorism expert at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think any other conflict has come anywhere near the quantity or scale of social media use we are seeing in Syria. This effect is going to continue for years to come ... it has been hugely valuable in terms of recruitment.”
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Source = http://on.ft.com/1jCoYSM }
(Image = Screenshot from the profile of a jihadi tweep)
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