“Our obligations to our country never cease but with
our lives.”John
Adams Letter
to Benjamin Rush 18
April 1808
I wrote and published this article in a small obscure security journal in 2014. It still holds so I'm republishing it here in 2020. For the longer paper on ISIS Use of Social Media as a Force Multiplier, see here.
ISIS (and its newer versions) has
proven very adept at using social media tools to win power, influence, recruits
and strategic advantage over their opponents. So far, they've used social media
tools (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Google+, Snapchat and others) to celebrate
and publicize their strategic, battle field, psychological and opponent
success after they have achieved them.
For more resources on how to combat them, see here.
For more resources on how to combat them, see here.
Here, I
will examine how they could use social media as a significant force multiplier
if they coordinate their assault with their social media skills to cause panic,
chaos, death and destruction in the United States. To do so, I will highlight
how easily ISIS or an ISIS clone can create widespread panic through the use of
social media tools as a force multiplier if they use these tools in tandem with
an actual physical assault within the United States.
A social
media force multiplier as I use the term here is an individual or small team
who, through the use of special tactics, can do the damage of a much larger
force. It is easy to understand that a skilled sniper is a force multiplier on
the battle field. Why? Because snipers are capable of force multiplication
without ever directly engaging the enemy, they are a commonly known force
multiplier.
Where we
use social media tools as ways to share information, fun, family, and find and
build friendships, ISIS uses them as a weapons platform. In reality, social media is the ultimate dual
use technology. And ISIS has figured out a way to use as a weapons platform to
attract recruits, to transmit their ideology, tactics, battles, blood lust and
psychological operations, on a scale that is exponential, not linear.
That is
what they have already done in just a few years since the Obama Administrations
dystopian so called, “Arab Spring” I propose that they will come at the
American people with a battalion-sized unit of jihadi social media “snipers” who
will create chaos, death, destruction, and panic to millions of American civilians
on the level that will be 9/11 times 1,000.
Enter “#ISIS” as a search term in Twitter, or YouTube, or
Google+, or in any social media platform.
You will be amazed at the number of entries that display when you do,
and most of those entries support them.
For example, when I did so on December 4, 2014, the very
first entry of the majority that all supported ISIS or had no idea what
religion they were evident.
Or, if you prefer, use the acronym for the Islamic State in
the Levant, enter “#ISIL” as a search term in Twitter and you will get similar
results.
More remarkable, when these same USC Berkeley students were
asked who was responsible for the bloodshed in the Middle East, the vast
majority blamed the United States.
If you think that ISIS confusion and outright support is
unique to UCS Berkeley, a majority of Harvard University students also say the
U.S. is a bigger threat to world peace than ISIS. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/10/08/twisted-ivy-harvard-students-say-us-bigger-threat-to-world-peace-than-isis/
If we read the other posts about ISIS on Twitter, this same
misinformation about who ISIS is and how they accomplish their goals is
widespread.
“So what?” you might ask. So a few students are misinformed
or misguided about ISIS. After all, ISIS is in the Middle East and hardly a
threat to us here in the U.S. thousands of miles away.
Well, the 9/11 Commission reached a number of conclusions
about what we had done wrong in the years leading up to that disaster, but
their number one finding was that our intelligence community suffered from a
“lack of imagination.”
That lack of imagination continues.
With social media tools, whatever safety we enjoyed once behind
oceans and land masses is gone. Hacker’s daily strike at our government, our
corporations, and our infrastructure’ digital gold. As they are after specific
information, be it financial, military, or otherwise, they generally do not
destroy the servers or data or destroy electronic, digital, water, financial or
other networks.
But what if ISIS were to strike those same networks? And
what if they used their substantial knowledge of social media as a force
multiplier to increase their destructive capability to justify their actions to
the world?
They’ve already proven themselves to be very adept at using
their social media tools to recruit and train candidates from dozens of
nations. They’ve uploaded their combat and recruitment films to Facebook,
YouTube and Twitter. Their assault on Syria and Iraq was probably the first
combat operation that was carried live on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other
social media.
They have demonstrated a professional grasp of messaging and
messaging tools. They understand that the optics as captured in social media is
as important to their victory as anything they achieve on the battlefield.
So…let’s take just one scenario.
Let’s assume that for a year or two they accumulate weapons
and explosives inside the U.S. If they preposition operatives and supplies in
just 300 (or 100 or even 50) U.S. neighborhoods, they have a rather formidable
force.
Then, they pick a day for a coordinated attack and hit hard.
But knowing how powerful social media can be as a force
multiplier, they not only stock piled arms and explosives. They also set up
hundreds of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and other social media, and
preprogrammed smart phones to spread their message rapidly…all as a force
multiplier.
As in
Syria and Iraq, they have one operative with a cell phone recording every
action. As fast as it happens, it is uploaded to social media. And they comment
about it all, enjoying the element of surprise and the advantage of first
report without counterviews reported.
Now our
misinformed USC Berkeley and Harvard University students are useful multipliers
for ISIS. A recognized tenet of social media marketing is trust. Anyone who
markets a product or a service on social media must have their customers trust
to assure that their message is recognized and broadcast to a wider customer
base.
So, too,
with ISIS. They need others to identify with their message and to transmit it
once they upload it. Given the indicated sympathy of the USC and Harvard
students, they have a trust base outer ring. Their own committed sympathizers
assure they get to the inner ring who can then multiply the impact of their
propaganda to a much wider ring.
With a
terrorist journalist assigned to each strike force, they could quickly
disseminate their message. A violent, coordinated, well executed attack on a
large number of American neighborhoods accompanied by a professional social
media campaign, in addition to causing a large loss of life and significant damage
to property, could accomplish the penultimate goal of every terrorist
organization: panic.
And they
have mastered this ability already. One Tweeter named Mahdi under the name
“Shami Witness,” an executive from Bangalore, India:
“…spent
his mornings, afternoons and evenings sending thousands of tweets of propaganda
about the Islamic State militant group, acting as the leading conduit of
information between Jihadi’s, supporters, and recruits.
His
tweets…were seen two million times each month, making him perhaps the most
influential Islamic State Twitter account, with over 17,700 followers.”[i]
And how
do we roll back these live terrorist tweets? Well, the Islamic terrorist strike
in Sydney, Australia at a Lindt café and chocolate store at the height of the
Christmas shopping in the heart of the financial district. What did the Sydney
police tweet?
FredZeppelin retweeted
@ABCNewsLive @ABC @9NewsAUS Sydney police have requested NO Tweets. Lives in danger;
don't want to provide gunmen with info they don't have
This was
excellent counter intelligence by the Sydney police. They knew the right
information to tweet, and did so.
Remember,
in contrast to prior terrorist hostage takings going all the way back to when
the Palestine Liberation Organization would hijack planes in the 1970’s when
all hostages were silenced, the terrorists at the Lindt store allowed their
hostages to keep their phones. Why?
Why would
they do that when doing so would provide an opportunity for them to communicate
with their families and the media?
For
precisely that reason. The terrorists had some hostages call news outlets and
try to get on the air. Again, why? I argue they know by now very how powerful a
force multiplier can be and they deliberately used it. While misguided,
uninformed or defeatist analysts in the West may label these actors “lone
wolfs,” they are well aware they are part of a larger 1,400 year long tradition
of martyrs bent on global domination.
Here is
Marcia’s social media post from the Lindt Café that was also meant as a force
multiplier.
Has our
foreign policy elite identified the ISIS social media weapons platform threat
or developed policies to eliminate it?
Well, to
judge by one white paper on the topic put out by the well-funded and
prestigious Brookings Institution called, “The ISIS Twitter Census: Defining
and describing the population of ISIS supporters on Twitter” by J.M. Berger and
Jonathon Morgan, the answer is yes to the first question but no to the second.
The
Brookings report examining the phenomena of ISIS social media skill on Twitter,
just one of several social media weapons platforms they use, only to conclude
with bizarre recommendations about nuance and gender, such as:
“Government, for its part,
must do something it has not traditionally excelled at: fully address a complex
situation and attempt to find a nuanced approach.”
And “There are many
attendant questions that should be of interest to civil libertarians. These
include, for example, whether suspensions disproportionately impact people of
certain genders, races, nationalities, sexual orientations, or religions.
Twitter in particular discloses literally no information about the accounts it
suspends, yet this activity takes place every day. Again, this is an area in
which companies would be well-advised to consider proactive measures, and it is
an area where government oversight may eventually come into play.”
After
decades of following terrorists, with ISIS being the latest brand, their
websites, their enablers, supporters and members, trust me...NONE of them are
nuanced. None worry about civil liberties, gender, or sexual orientation. They
are equal opportunity killers. And they
are very clear when they say on their websites: “We have been at war for 1,400
years. You forgot. We didn’t.”
The Brookings
analysis reminds me of the monks of Lindisfarne monastery debating theology as the
Vikings arrive and debated with their broad axes. That is a metaphor for what
we face today with the Mohammedians, whatever politically correct psycho-babble
Brookings and the foreign policy elite religiously parrot in the media daily.
The daily
atrocities of ISIS, from enslaving, raping and selling Christian, Yazidi and
other women, their hanging bodies from gantries of towns they conquer, their
cutting off human heads, their torture and killing of prisoners, their destruction
of ancient cultural treasures, their use of children as soldiers, their
throwing gays off roofs, their burning or churches and homes...well, their
savagery is endless. But it is not nuanced.
Conclusion: Orson
Wells in his famous 1938 drama “War of the Worlds” achieved massive citizen
panic using just his voice and an earlier social media tool, the radio. ISIS
has far more sophisticated tools at its disposal, and it knows how to use them.
Once
underway, this kind of large-scale citizen panic is difficult to contain. As
they have already cut off captives heads, engaged in mass murder and mass rape,
enslaved thousands, turned Christian churches into prisons, recruited, trained
and activated suicide bombers and engaged in other widespread and repeated
violent behavior, their launching multiple attacks inside the U.S. is easily
imaginable.
Given
their proficiency and experience coordinating their attacks with social media
propaganda, ISIS using social media as a multiplier force is easily imaginable.
The full impact of that attack is not imaginable, although their use of these
social media tools for the past several years in the Middle East and globally
shows they are proficient in their use.
We can
shut down ISIS social media tools BEFORE their use of them results in large
numbers of death, panic, mayhem and destruction. Twitter has finally begun to
shut down thousands of jihadi accounts, but thousands of others spring up when
they do.
Maybe the
Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security
Agency, and the dozens of other intelligence agencies the taxpayers give
billions to each year can assist Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Facebook and the
other social media tools ISIS uses as weapons platforms in the task of shutting
down their force multiplier.
The consequences
of waiting until AFTER this social media force multiplier is used on a larger
scale are unimaginable. We can connect the dots on this one NOW. We can also
take care of this threat NOW if we show the wisdom, courage, and action that
our future depends on. The millions of men and women who gave their lives and
limbs for this country deserve no less. So, too, do our children and grandchildren
whose precious lives hang in the balance.
Background
Resources
Footnotes
