ABSTRACT
Social media lends itself well to promotion of terrorist causes, as terrorism has generally been more successful in achieving strategic or long-range goals. Social media is used to personalise and legitimise terrorist acts and status as religious warfare and soldiers. The effects of social media can simultaneously trivialise, desensitise, outrage and inflame the most hideous or innocent of acts. Ultimately, social media has become the most far-reaching form of psychological operations, hence its popularity and attractiveness to terrorist groups. If we were writing a grand cinematic screenplay detailing the terrorists’ love affair with social media, like any romantic tale it has a long and complicated back story. Social media efforts have focused on ISIS’s military strength and called on followers to join in the fighting. Increasingly, terrorist groups and their sympathisers are using youth dominated communities like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life, as well as their Arabic equivalents to recruit.
