By JACOB SILVERMAN
July 22, 2014
The skirmish began like so many others: with a tweet. On June 26, a Twitter user with the handle @AboudouAbdallah, who identifies himself as living in Morocco and supporting the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), tweeted the following remark: “I just want to remind you … never forget what happens to your ’soldiers’ in #Fallujah #Iraq #CalamityWillBefallUS.” Attached to the tweet was a photo of the burned body of a Blackwater contractor hanging from a bridge. Abdallah has 535 followers, and the message accrued only two retweets and three favorites, but someone from the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), a division of the State Department, picked up on it.
The center then posted the following reply from @ThinkAgain_DOS, its English language-Twitter account: “@AboudouAbdallah I want to remind you what happens to terrorists who target us #CalamityWillBefallUS.” Attached to this tweet was a low-resolution photo of Osama bin Laden in his loungewear, watching television in his Abbottabad compound. Stamped on the photo, in text that for some reason alternates between black and purple, was a warning: “Would you throw away your life for those who hide far away?”
Not much about the State Department’s tweet made sense. Why use such a poor quality photo? Why did they repeat Abdallah’s hashtag, which was a threat toward the United States? And what gives with the black-and-purple font, which looks better suited for a placard scrawled by a high school kid running for class president?
But it was too late to debate aesthetics. The battle was on. A user with the handle @alisalehi1292 chimed in with a simple message: “Sh. Osama=2 USSR=0 USA=0,” the putative score in the war between superpowers and the late bin Laden. @alisalehi1292 added that the mujahideen will go to heaven, “while your rapists and torturers live a cursed life [PTSD] and then are thrown in hell.” Responding earnestly, @ThinkAgain_DOS asked, “why do u wish to reward those who murder innocents?” and linked to an article showing that al Qaeda’s attacks in Iraq have mostly killed civilians. Again, the State Department staffer invoked the #CalamityWillBefallUS hashtag.
The American effort appeared to amuse some of the Islamist tweeps who were engaged in the battle. “Your boss is going to fire you soon if these tweets don’t improve,” joked someone named Abu Ottoman.
This exchange wasn’t accidental or uncommon. It’s part of a larger State Department program to change how the United States deals with extremist communications online. For years, the government vacillated over how to respond to al Qaeda’s online broadcasts, from its martyrdom videos to Inspire, the terrorist group’s slick English-language digital magazine. Fighting back was considered beneath the office—we don’t negotiate with terrorists and all that.
Under the Bush administration, the government also believed it was fighting such a vast, communist-like ideological threat that there were simply too many jihadists to try to dissuade them one by one on social media. The better approach, the previous administration thought, was to campaign broadly for freedom. “For the longest time, there was total resistance in the State Department to badmouthing al Qaeda — as a job that the State Department should be engaged in — and that the real solution should be to sell America, to tell America’s story,” says Will McCants, who helped set up the CSCC when he served as a senior adviser for countering violent extremism at the State Department.
That has all changed under Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, who took a much narrower view of terrorism, confining his focus to al Qaeda and seeking to make it less a war than a law-enforcement and intelligence problem. Under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the State Department began to a pursue a policy of what she called “twenty-first-century statecraft,” a broad designation that included anything from using social media to speak directly to people in the developing world to helping foreign dissidents set up secure communications networks. Now, the government is trying to go on offense, challenging terrorist propaganda all across the new digital battleground and seeking to wean would-be terrorists from the cause, recruit by recruit, using the hashtag #ThinkAgainTurnAway. The CSCC wants to “contest the space” that, in the words of State Department senior official Alberto Fernandez, who oversees the program, “had previously been conceded to the enemy.”
In practice, this means that the center, with its $5 million budget, verbally jousts with jihadists on social media all day long. Not a bad idea, according to experts like McCants. The problem is that it appears to be losing—at least when it comes to showing the quick thinking and verbal dexterity that so characterizes the big winners in the social-media universe. In an arena in which people are largely inured to the frequent intrusions of advertising, the center is conducting itself like it’s the only propaganda operation in town.
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.
The rise of social media has transformed how jihadist propaganda is disseminated, news is spread and recruits are gathered. Extremist groups have proven themselves to be rather adept at utilizing new forms of digital communication. Knowing that Western intelligence agencies are likely watching, ISIL and its sympathizers have taken to hopscotching among various social networks, using each for different tasks: Twitter and YouTube for propagandizing and making initial contacts; Ask.fm for establishing a closer rapport; and private messaging apps like Kik and Surespot for disseminating instructions about how to find an ISIL-associated imam, or where to cross the porous Turkey-Syria border.
At the same time, open-source intelligence — the gathering of intelligence from public forums — has become an essential tool for analyzing the opinions of large populations, tracking terrorist activities and seeing how radicalization plays out online. Yet despite this glut of new information sources, there had been reluctance about using the State Department as a bully pulpit until fairly recently.
In the past, the American government preferred to respond to jihadist activity online with covert means — monitoring chatrooms, shutting down password-protected forums or making them difficult to access. Sometimes intelligence analysts would let members of a jihadist forum know that they were watching. “It’s like inserting an informant into a prison to sow distrust,” says William Braniff, the executive director of START, a terrorism research center at the University of Maryland. “People no longer trust their cellmate.”
But those efforts also had the effect of making forums “much less vibrant places,” Braniff says. Jihadists began to retreat from communicating in spaces where they once felt they could speak freely, and intelligence gathering suffered.
With the enthusiastic support of Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration started up the CSCC effort in 2011. Over the next year, using images, videos and text and communicating in Urdu, Somali, Punjabi and Arabic, the center’s 50-member team began posting on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, always identifying themselves as part of the U.S. government. There would be nothing covert about this effort. In a December 2013 speech, Fernandez said that this collective output had amounted to “18,000 engagements” to date.
More recently, with ISIL and other al Qaeda splinter groups popping up in different places, and attracting new adherents from Western Europe and other English-speaking populations, the U.S. government has had to step up its English-language efforts. Last month, the State Department awarded a contract worth about $575,000 to JTG Inc., a small, privately held company based in Vienna, Virginia, to expand its English-language offerings. The contract calls for a campaign manager as well as writer-analysts designers, and multimedia specialists — six employees in total who will work out of Foggy Bottom. It’s the second CSCC-related contract for JTG, whose previous work includes a $4.7 million deal to produce curricula for the Defense Language Institute. (Both the State Department and JTG declined to comment for this story.)
Although the State Department program operates in a technological milieu defined by precise metrics, data analysis and finely honed targeting procedures, it’s difficult to say exactly what its effect has been—whether any ISIL sympathizers have been turned away. As of this week, the @ThinkAgain_DOS Twitter account had 3,341 followers, but the State Department hasn’t released any information indicating that the program has been a success and instead has relied on the argument that terrorists have had the run of the Internet, so something should be done about it. That sets up a thorny challenge. As Rep. Brad Sherman put it to Ambassador Fernandez in a congressional hearing, “Are you so sure that you’re going to be able to out-debate them?” Defenders of the program, not least CSCC’s first director, Richard LeBaron, sound more than a little defensive when the question comes up. “So you do nothing? So you don’t try? You don’t experiment? You don’t spend a small amount of money?” said LeBaron, who is now retired from the State Department. “This organization probably costs less than one drone every year. Probably considerably less than one Goddamn drone. And to tell me that that is a waste of money is just utter bullshit. That’s a good use of money. That’s an ideal use of money — experiment and learn, so that you don’t have to use the drones.”
In the end, I decided to ask some of the people the CSCC was targeting what they thought. As extremist sympathizers who seemingly hadn’t yet joined the fight, these were precisely the audience that “Think Again” would hope to convert. Maybe they had some suggestions.
One of them was Abu Ottoman, the tweep who told the writer behind @ThinkAgain_DOS that he’d be fired if he didn’t improve his tweeting. Abu Ottoman seems to love battling “Think Again Turn Away” on Twitter, repeatedly mocking the State team’s efforts. (“John Kerry must very disappointed,” he taunted the CSCC in another message.) He’s also expert at needling CSCC staffers about their use of Muslim terminology. After @ThinkAgain_DOS referenced the Quran in one tweet, Abu Ottoman responded, “Who knew that the US State Dep had so many Quranic scholars. And making takfir?#TheManyTheologiansOfWashington” — the joke being that anonymous State Department employees have taken it upon themselves to say that members of ISIL, by killing fellow Muslims, are betraying the faith.
If Abu Ottoman weren’t extolling jihad and railing against Jews much of the time, I’d say that he’s actually quite funny. Over a series of direct messages on Twitter, I asked him what he thought of the State Department’s public outreach. (Abu Ottoman declined to share much about his background, but he writes English with the facility of a native speaker.)
“If somebody thinks again or turns away, it won’t be from their ham-fisted trolling,” says Abu Ottoman. “The most potentially effective part of that account is it can possibly make some brothers slightly nervous when the U.S. State Department singles them out and calls them ‘terrorists’ just for sharing an opinion. It’s like the evil eye of focusing on you. Haha. They’re trying to scare people into silence.”
Abu Khalid, who identifies as an ISIL supporter living in the West, says, “They will never change anybody — rather they are only enraging people who support groups such as ISIL.”
When I pointed out that, compared to the CSCC and its clunky graphic design, ISIL, also known as ISIS, is considered quite skilled at social media, Abu Khalid tried to explain why. “ISIS social media actually show the good they’ve done whether it is food distributions or developing state institutions,” he says. He also pointed out some inconsistencies in the CSCC’s language and arguments. In one instance, he noted, the State Department tweeted a photo of a bombed-out Shia shrine, but referred to it as a mosque. “Think Again Turn Away” excoriates ISIL for “killing Muslims,” Abu Khalid says, but “in fact, we don’t and many Sunnis don’t view Shias as Muslims.”
Of course, many people, not least of them the staffers behind “Think Again Turn Away,” would reply that these are merely twisted semantics. Most Muslims do consider Shiites to be fellow Muslims. And whatever name you call it, a ruined shrine still represents the wrecked hulk of something that once held dear religious and cultural value. ISIL’s claim that it’s not killing Muslims only remains true when seen through the blinkered prism of strict Salafist ideology.
So it’s not that the “Think Again Turn Away” people have the wrong message; clearly they have a point to make. The issue is how they’re delivering it. ISIL, which also has an English-language magazine called Dabiq, is already far ahead of Western governments in how it engages with its followers and enemies alike. The terrorist group has popularized its own app, available on the web and for Android phones, called The Dawn of Glad Tidings. ISIL supporters can connect to the app, which asks for authorization to post to users’ Twitter accounts. These users are still free to post on their own, but the app allows ISIL to send out coordinated tweets across hundreds or even thousands of supporters’ accounts. That lets them spread messages quickly and widely — including announcements of recent victories — and try to get their own hashtags trending. Perhaps most importantly, it allows supporters to feel as if they are more closely tied to the organization.
The CSCC hasn’t seemed able to find a way into the perspective of the youthful fundamentalist who still has one foot in Western digital culture. As a consequence, the two sides can appear to be talking past one another, as they sometimes use the same language for vastly different ends. When @MuhajirSumalee, the handle of a jihadist who goes by the name Abu Usamah, tweets a photo with the caption, “Extremist ISIS soldier Abu Usamah radicalizing innocent Syrian children,” he’s doing so out of admiration and pride. He’s also being knowing and sarcastic in a way that the CSCC would never be.
Still, there may be hope for the program if State can get its tone and messaging right. When ISIL decided to declare itself a “caliphate” ruled by a little-known militant, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the new leader’s followers found themselves fending off critiques that, during his dramatic public debut in a Mosul mosque, he was wearing an expensive watch — a sign, perhaps, of corruption or immodesty. “Is #ISIS warlord Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi wearing a Rolex or an ‘Islamic watch?’” CNN tweeted, linking to a lengthy article devoted to the question. The whole thing was rather silly and petty, especially given the surrounding bloodshed. But this brief tour through the outrage cycle reflects a common feature of digitally mediated politics, where every gesture is recorded and analyzed and hypocrisy is among the greatest sins. In the case of the State Department team, this might have been a good time to get a bit sarcastic about the new caliph’s material habits: Suddenly, Baghdadi’s supplicants weren’t talking about a mythical man. Abu Ottoman, for instance, tweeted a defense that, if it weren’t absurd to be debating a mass murderer’s choice of timepiece, would almost seem sweet and pitiful: “A good watch is an essential navigational instrument as well as many other things. Astronauts wear expensive Swiss watches even.”
These are the kinds of cleavages that the State Department might leverage — both the petty political skirmishes and the larger debates over doctrine, authority and massacres of fellow Muslims. But if they are to succeed, they’ll have to move beyond the “Just Say No to Terrorism” approach to social media.
Jacob Silverman’s book, Terms of Service: Social Media, Surveillance, and the Price of Constant Connection, will be published by HarperCollins next year.
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