When I hear the word activist, I usually think of a passionately good-willed young adult holding a sign shouting at the top of their lungs.
Of course, my stereotypical image is a dated view because much of the activism today happens online — where keyboards and monitors replace cardboard signs and the clicking of keys rings louder than the physical voice.
My view is not only off target for this reason, but also the image of a “passionately good willed young adult” is not correct either. Activists take all shapes and forms, especially online activists. I can no longer count on an activist being passionate, for some online activism groups membership is simply getting the emails. Activists come in all ages, from adorable grade school girls to fat old men. Furthermore, I can no longer count on an activist being good willed. In fact, they can be quite evil. However, they can still be understood as an activist group, and indeed, the example I am writing about can be considered in some respects, a wildly successful online social movement which has gotten activists united and committing themselves to furthering the cause, all the while propagating a great deal of hatred. I’m talking about The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
If you haven’t heard about ISIS yet, prepare for your day to be ruined. It’s a new radical fundamentalist Islamic group which has been tearing through the Middle East[0]. Their goal is essentially to raise a Caliphate (or state governed under sharia law by a decedent of Mohammad and to bring about the apocalypse[1]. These folks are pretty bad. So bad, that the African terrorist group Boko Haram, who is also in the category of “really fucking bad”, pledged their allegiance to ISIS.
A part of what has made ISIS so successful has been their activity as an online social movement. Of course, I am not the first to notice how successfully they have been using social media.
Emerson Brooking notes that they used a translingual strategy, where they upped their presence in English materials in order to evade attention until they had captured a strategic victory at Mosul (a large Iraqi city).[2] This is probably one of the more novel techniques, and could use more analysis. It would be very interesting to study translingual techniques in an environment such as India, where there are N different local languages, studying diffusion patterns would be pretty cool to figure out optimal change-making. Projects like Global Language Network have already built some of the tools that would be needed to perform this study.[4]
One major change for these ‘activists’ has been the use of a global public forum, the likes of which (ie, twitter) have only recently become largely popular. Whereas organization used to take place on interest specific forums, these General-Purpose platforms provide much greater surface area with a broader public allowing an easier access for untrained soldiers.[2] There are negatives to such a platform being made easy for all to use, for instance one ISIS fighter revealed secret locations. [3]. Twitter emerged as an important platform in the region during the Arab Spring as a tool for positive social change, but this illustrates the potential for tools to do both good and bad.
ISIS also employs pro-government tweets as well, showing them performing services targeted at local audiences.[2] This is to raise confidence with the citizenry in ISIS’s ability to run the state, much like how Hamas provides a great deal of humanitarian services,
The Brookings institute has conducted a detailed analysis of the ISIS twitter strategy.[5][6][7] Some interesting notes from the study are that suspensions on the platform, performed by twitter, have been an effective means at reducing the amount of exposure ISIS receives. However, the effects of cutting these activists off from the platform is unknown (it could make things worse). Another interesting note is that there have been many instances with location metadata included, not just the mess-up previously mentioned[3]. Most notably, (in my opinion), is that the researchers posited that there is a small group of highly active individuals who are driving the social media drive. This hints that although it seems organic, it is not necessarily a flat structure: there may be a higher degree of structure to the tweeting as certain individuals act as ‘super retweeters’ to surface and curate the most powerful hashtags and images generated by the masses.
Notably they use Twitter and Facebook as recruiting platforms.[2] This is important because it means not only are they putting out media to scare the US, but also to recruit. This dualism represents a very interesting, perhaps novel, social media tactic where they must simultaneously put out horrifying content while appealing to another demographic.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant [1] http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/ [2] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/31/isis-s-use-of-social-media-to-reach-you-its-new-audience.html [3] http://time.com/3651559/new-zealand-isis-twitter/ [4] http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books [5] http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/03/isis-twitter-census-berger-morgan [6]http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/03/isis-twitter-census-berger-morgan/isis_twitter_census_berger_morgan.pdf [7] http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2015/03/06-isis-twitter-census-berger