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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.
If you can find something to believe in that is bigger than yourself, it can make all your doubts and insecurities go away.
So either be grateful or hateful that you're smart.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
For the same reason why Climate-change deniers, anit-GMO campaigners, vaccine truthers and other Conspiracy theories find such fertile ground on the internet. People don't go looking for impartial information, they go looking for material that affirms their already held beliefs. The internet offers them the opportunity to find and like-minded people and form communities even when members are separated by large geographical distances
Yes, they pay better than most other jobs in the region, in dollars. Apply the religious angle to get them to work for a little less. When ISIS cut wages a while back, many of the fighters jumped over to Al Qaeda. Toss the culture crap, it's plain old capitalism that motivates these guys. And maybe the drought, too. War is still more profitable than desalination.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They are financed by Saudi Arabia, an "ally" of the United States and the Obama administration, who buys materials through the United States, which are smuggled through Turkey (another United States "ally") into Syria and ISIS territory. The reason the NSA is targeting the citizenry is because if they followed the money trail, then they would need to need to begin arresting other administration officials.
The NSA has better things to do than pinpoint ransomware operators. We pay their salary, but that doesn't buy us their loyalty.
ISIS isn't a significant threat to Americans, but it creates an enemy to fear, which is extremely useful to those who wish to strengthen their own power base by taking freedom (or privacy) away from their citizens.
It is well-known that most domestic terrorists are well educated, middle class to wealthy individuals.
Most Domestic 'Jihadists' Are Educated, Well-Off
However, many foreign terrorists are also very wealthy.
Osama Bin Laden Had $29 Million in Wealth, Requested it Mainly Be Used for âJihadâ(TM) in Personal Will
Whatâ(TM)s made the Islamic State one of the richest terrorist armies in history?
The World's Richest Terrorists
This "we'll take care of you" narrative is just about the only thing you hear from the do-gooders that're fscking up by the numbers here in Europe.
Free monies? Check. Housing? Check. More help "integrating? Check. Special and remedial language courses and schooling? Check and check. Extra doubplelus more counselling? Check, check and check. They're getting way more "help" than the natives do. It doesn't help at all.
There are piles of evidence that nothing of that actually works. And still you can regularly hear politicians harping on a schooling or support or whatever other course track thingy this week. It still doesn't work.
The problem is that these extremist youths aren't extremist because they're poor. They're poor because of their death cult beliefs. But because of their beliefs they're easy to convince to dig in even deeper, and anyway, even observing that it's their backward belief system of virulent hate that's keeping them back is "racists". This is why, with every terrorist attack, even where the attackers where shouting very literal and widely known invocations of their belief, you'll see oodles of "experts" tumbling over each other to insist that nothing of all that had to with their so-called "religion" at all, nosiree, honest. You're not supposed to point to the actual cause because that's not polite, see?
There are more problems, but the fundamental problem should already be visible: The west is operating on a certain set of assumptions ("we'll help you, then you'll be thankful and take the hint to be more like us"), and these people are operating on wildly different assumptions ("We get free stuff? Sure, give us some more. Us thankful? Nah. We have our own 'culture'. And now that free stuff is a right so we demand more or we'll call you racist... again.") that makes us look weak and contemptible in their eyes.
And that's the European situation. The US situation is possibly worse because the US and thus the US government is even worse about this perception dichotomy thing. It's why the US has lost just about every war in the last couple decades. Military might? Sure. Er, excuse me, "AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!". But making it stick? HA HA HA HA. The name of the game is "hearts and minds" and against these people, the west sucks at it. The more west you look, in fact, the more they suck at it.
This is why, for one, Assad needs very much to stay where he is, yet "the west" keeps on wishing him away. This is why the "Arabian spring" turned into nothing short of a global disaster. If you're wondering how that could come to pass, well, there were these wars arming and destabilising the region, and then all it needed was a relatively small trigger. The only spark of hope for us is that the region is full of extremists that disagree with each other and therefore dislike each other to death, and that's not much of a spark. We in the west are more or less entirely powerless, because we're so completely out of touch with their frame of reference.
And that in turn is exactly what's making this counter-propaganda so excreably bad: It doesn't resonate with the target demographic at all. The ISIS propaganda, OTOH, resonates very well indeed, to the point it has no problem getting hordes of disaffected young men to join them and commit mass atrocities.
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.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
You might have that backwards.
You are welcome on my lawn.
an "ally" of the United States and the Obama administration
They were also an "ally" of the Bush administration, and the Clinton administration, and the prior Bush administration and so on; because they're allies (for whatever that's worth) of the United States, regardless of its presiding administration.
Why would you mention Obama here unless for a needless (and false) partisan attempt at blame-assigning? US-Saudi relations have nothing to do with Obama specifically and long, long predate him.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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Oh, sure, it's all our fault, we haven't given them enough opportunities.
Take Salah Abdeslam, for example. He had a good job as a technician at the Brussels public transport company but got fired because he regularly didn't show up for work. We should have given him more opportunities, we deserve to get shot to bits for not helping these people more.
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.