Social Media news: ISIL continues to use Twitter effectively to engage supporters and control the organization’s narrative. ISIL has capitalized on Twitter features such as hashtags to expand its audience. A hashtag is a way to create a grouping of discussions in a mostly unmonitored ad hoc discussion forum. If promoted by enough people, a hashtag will appear in Twitter’s “Trending Topics.” Hashtags are not registered or controlled by any one user or group of users and are not retired from public availability. As an example, ISIL has used hashtags associated with premier English soccer league clubs such as #MUFC, #WHUFC, #LFC, and #THFC. For several weeks in early 2014, ISIL supporters were able to download a Twitter app from the Google Play Store called The Dawn of Glad Tidings or Dawn for short. The app was advertised as a way to receive updates on ISIL’s efforts. Once a user downloaded the app, it would automatically post ISIL materials to each user’s Twitter account, spacing the tweets out at a rate and in numbers that would not alert Twitter’s anti-spam detectors. Each user essentially became a server for dissemination of ISIL propaganda materials. When ISIL stormed Mosul, the app posted 40,000 tweets in a single day. The app has since been removed from the Google Play Store after being available for several weeks. (Kevin, PAO)
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 16:52:26 +0000