Uses and Abuses of Social Media in Conflict Zones

by SWJ Editors

SWJ Blog Post | July 11, 2014

Doug Bernard

Voice of America

It can be difficult to remember a time when social networks like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook weren’t always with us, humming along in the background and linking us to the rest of the world. But in fact they’re not even a decade old, and mobile devices like smartphones – where they increasingly live – are even newer than that.

Yet in a short span of time, insurgent groups, political organizations and governments have all rapidly adopted social media platforms to press their case, confuse their opponents, seize world attention and gain advantage over their adversaries.

At present in conflicts from Iraq to Ukraine, from skirmishes in the South China Sea to civilian protests in Venezuela, social media has become a key tool for leveraging money, recruits, opinion and potentially, even victory.

Each new conflict is providing new learning experiences about what’s possible, and what works best. And like any tool, social media have all sorts of positive and negative uses. That said, several analysts VOA recently spoke with suggest that, at least at present, the extremists seem to have the upper hand in wielding their new-found digital power.

“More Sophisticated Than Any Group Before”

The recent images from Iraq have become as familiar as they are unsettling.

From the start of their effort to seize territory in Syria and Iraq by force, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, has also waged a heated social media campaign that surprised many analysts for its sophistication and effectiveness.

Earlier this year, as militant fighters swept through Western Iraq, ISIL’s social media updates reflected the brutality of the conflict. With tweets, bloody photos on Instagram and graphic videos posted on various sites, ISIL portrayed itself as an unsparing foe intent on shooting, decapitating and otherwise executing as many opponents as possible.

Which makes ISIL’s most recent videos all the more surprising.

In one, a smiling shopkeeper, his store filled with produce and bustling with customers, happily tells us how smoothly everything is going. In another, a giggling group of children crowd around ISIL fighters handing out cotton candy and ice cream, bouncing the children on their shoulders. In yet others, temporarily removed from the web, ISIL fighters cannonball into a river and engage in a pickup snowball fight.

“The message is ‘Look how evil we are! We’re just having a snowball fight, come on down and join the party!’” says Cori Dauber, professor of communications studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.

“I’ve been looking at their longer videos,” she told VOA. “I would say that they are, by an order of magnitude, more sophisticated than any group that has come before.”

Dauber studies the use of images by extremist groups in propaganda, and recently authored the book “YouTube Wars.” Appearing on a recent taping of VOA’s “Encounter” program, she said that terrorists have always been among the first adopters of new technologies.

“And that’s been true of digital technologies as well,” she said. “YouTube, Twitter, Instagram; they are incredibly creative in their use of those technologies and they use them to recruit, to fundraise, to spread their message.”

A review of some of the videos released by Al Hayat Media Center, ISIL’s production service, underscore Dauber’s point. This one, uploaded in June, features broadcast quality graphics, highly stylized editing and production, and HD imagery set to inflammatory recruitment rhetoric. But just as importantly, there’s also an absence of the extreme imagery ISIL was previously known for, perhaps signaling a shift away from blood and toward a subtler message.

One possible reason: now that ISIL has self-stylized itself into simply “the Islamic State”, they need to begin acting like those governments it has been fighting.

“What’s interesting about ISIL is that you can’t take things off the Internet,” says Andrew Borene, an attorney with Steptoe & Johnson LLP and a former Marine Corps intelligence officer. “If they do at some point hope to achieve any modicum of recognition as a state in the society of countries, these videos are going to count against them. And it gets very difficult to make a transition under the old model from terrorist as a political actor to an organized state.”

Borene agrees, as have other analysts who spoke with VOA recently, that ISIL’s social media outreach has far outstripped not only that of competing jihadist groups, but of many of the governments and institutions in the region.

But, he says, social media isn’t all pluses for insurgents. “It puts them forward. It puts their faces on the Internet for identification by operatives in the future. It puts their locations for training grounds on the Internet. So there are upsides and downsides to increased activity by these groups.”

Playing to the Head and the Heart

ISIL’s apparent victories, so far at least, on the Twitter battlefields may be notable for their advanced strategies, but other less-skilled insurgent groups have seen a similar tactical edge over governments before. Separatists in Ukraine skillfully outmaneuvered Ukrainian nationalists and even the government, Turkish opponents to Prime Minister Erdogan continue to bedevil that government, and Venezuelan authorities have so far not been able to silence those organizing against the government of Nicolás Maduro.

Borene and Dauber both say that insurgents may have a built-in advantage when it comes to using social media, as so many of the most effective messages are those that appeal to the heart and the gut, rather than the head.

“It’s not that states don’t care about emotions”, says Dauber. It’s just that they have very different standards to adhere to than an insurgent group that can do or say just about anything, and often do.

Take, for example, the most recent example of ISIL rebels taking sledgehammers to the Tomb of Jonah in Mosul, then posting the video online. “A state simply would not do that,” says Dauber. “So it’s not that states don’t appeal emotion, but they wouldn’t appeal to emotion in a way that clearly puts them in violation of various national conventions, codes or cultural norms.”

Governments may be “a step behind” insurgent groups, as Borene notes, but that doesn’t mean they and their political and social counterparts are powerless.

“Non-traditional actors are the ones that will embrace the emerging technologies most rapidly,” he says. “But moving forward I think you’re going to see public safety planners and defense professionals all around the world using this to plan ahead, to make integrated strategic communications that include social and traditional media outlets.”

While the social media landscape may currently tilt toward those without power protesting against those who have it, Dauber says a technology is evolving so rapidly that there’s no telling what it will look like, even in the near future.

“We have not yet quite figured it out, but this stuff is very, very new, and we’ve just got to be fast and smart in our use of these technologies,” says Dauber. “We’ve got to figure out ways to counter message and I think part of that is that we’ve got to make it a priority.”

VOA's complete conversation with Cori Dauber and Andrew Borene can be heard this weekend on “Encounter” on VOA’s English frequencies, or online at www.voanews.com/encounter.