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Why ISIS Is Winning The Online Propaganda War (dailydot.com)
blottsie writes: The U.S. government has been unable to fight the Islamic State on the one battlefield it currently commands: the Internet. Exemplified by an August 2014 video produced by the State Department, the U.S. remains ineffective at combating violent extremism online. A definitive report by the Daily Dot explores how ISIS succeeds in spreading its message and recruiting new militants, and why the U.S. government continues to fail in its efforts to stop ISIS online.
Because we're helping them.
Think about:
1. Everything you know about ISIS.
2. Who showed you these things?
By portraying ISIS as evil incarnate and letting them provoke a reaction out of us, we are helping them get what they want.
Without everyone being up in arms about them and feeding the media frenzy about a bunch of backwards goatherders, they would not have been able to successfully recruit their terror cells.
Can someone explain to my why that in the United States of America, the right hates and wants to carpet bomb a bunch of right wing extremists who believe in God, Guns and family values, while the Wacky left wing wants to protect and defend a bunch of people who want to keep women covered and walking 6 paces behind the men.
Why do we fight the wars we do? It is because someone in the media says those guys are evil. I remember when Russia was evil and the Mujahudeen were our buddies. What has changed?
To me the propoganda war is being waged in the United States against the citizens of the United States. It is being waged to turn the USA in upon itself. White against black. Left against Right. In the meantime China and Mexico grow rich. I believe nothing of what I hear on the news. None of it makes any sense to me anymore. It is all a conspiracy made up by someone on high for their own agenda.
If the three letter agencies can’t make enough money selling drugs to finance their black ops, perhaps a foray into ransomware will pick up some business?
In all fairness to Trump, he is an excellent con-man! I do however think he has not quite thought this through, because if he becomes president, he will have to deliver _something_ over those 4 years, quite unlike his usual modus operandi.
Yeah, the most interesting question about Trump is "What is his face-saving end game?"
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Contributions from wealthy donors in Saudi Arabia (as well as Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates) does comprise a major part of the revenues ISIS collects. However, it's not the greatest part. Most of it comes from theft (particularly of oil resources), kidnapping, extortion and taxation.
You'd think that by now all the oil resource sources and distribution facilities would have been blown to hell and back to keep ISIS from having that money.
There's obviously a deeper game being played.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
I'm trying to figure out why this got downvoted. It's an extremely valid point. It seems like the "coalition" did little but target ISIS pickup trucks *until* the Russians came in and started bombing the oil facilities, raising the bar and doing some real damage to ISIS's economic infrastructure. Now the coalition is finally taking out some oil refineries but it's very little very late.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
This assertion itself illustrates the the disconnect in culture and assumptions.
You are arguing from the typical, venerable, valid-in-post-enlightenment-culture dynamic in which ideas propogate on their own merit. In such an environment, the adaptive strategy for dealing with bad ideas is to ignore them and let them die on their own lack of merit, or "burn out" as you put it. This has been known to work as long as the immunity mechanisms against bad ideas are intact, and are capable of dealing with the particular strain of ideological pathogen.
This strategy is not effective against ideologies not in that set, such as ones that spread themselves by the sword or by intimidation or in populations that believe ideas for reasons disconnected from the merit of the idea itself. The fact that said ideologies are bad or invalid or incompatible with civilization as we know it is not directly relevant to whether they will catch on or not. Such ideologies have spread themselves very effectively and they don't care that they are regression or that they are harmful. Effective disease agents dont care that they make the host organism sick, they are effective by definition if they propogate themselves, and just ignoring the symptoms and counting on typical immune mechanisms to make them go away doesn't always work.
Westerners think that ignoring ideas or debunking them is going to always work, but those techniques only work in certain contexts and against certain threats. Ghandi's techniques were only effective because he was operating against the British Empire and pushing their buttons, for example.
The West is not able to fight back bad ideas because, sometimes in an attempt to stop low level autoimmune problems, she has ingested massive doses of immune-suppression; immune mechanisms such as the nuclear family, shared but diverse Christian heritage, societal structures are weakened, made obsolete by technology, or dismantled, and ideological infections thought to be conquered are breaking back out in the unprepared populace, and getting some rest and drinking some fluids until it burns out may not work.