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8 September 2024

Decoding Social Media’s Role In Taliban 2.0 And Its Implications For Afghan Youth – Analysis

Muhammad Akran, Asim Nasar and Shama Perveen

The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan (here- after Taliban 2.0) following their takeover on Aug. 15, 2021, marked a significant turning point in the nation’s socio-political landscape (Akram et al., 2023). Amidst their two-decade-long resistance, the Taliban employed various tactics, including the strategic use of social media platforms, to influence public narratives and consolidate their power. Other tactics included, but were not limited to, addressing people’s grievances in rural areas, continuous messaging about their will to retake the country, and framing themselves as the true warriors of Islam (Misra, 2002).

The usage of social media by extremist groups and individuals to radicalize for violent extremism is a threat that goes beyond any one country (Almoqbel & Xu, 2019). The under-controlled spread of misinformation on social media helps extremist groups to disseminate radical and violent beliefs to a wide range of audiences. With minimal financing, social media can spread propaganda to the wider population (Nakov & Martino, 2021). Social media platforms allow people of diverse backgrounds and worldviews to share their opinions in an open and unstructured way, but on the other hand, it has also eased mass radicalization by extremist groups (Gallacher et al, 2021; Ul Rehman et al, 2021). Since moral intuitions are central to defining human behavior, extremist groups target people’s moral intuitions to propagate their radi- cal and extremist ideologies (Hopp et al., 2021). Young people, especially between the ages of 15 to 24 who spend comparatively more time online, are highly vulnerable to radicalization amidst their higher chances of exposure to hateful and extremist content online (Costello et al., 2020).

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