Why scramble to shut them down? Isn't this a valuable source of information? Wouldn't we want to know what they are saying, who is engaging with them, etc.? Why push them further underground?
Hell, why not just make a social network JUST for terrorists with no threat of shutting anybody down and then just tap into that info?
Because propaganda actually works. We're not trying to push down the actual terrorists; we're trying to win information war waged inside the minds of potential future terrorists.
You would think that people aren't that stupid. I would think that too. But after witnessing the whole country (Russia) going down the rabbit hole of paranoid madness with just a couple of years of propaganda, I don't think that anymore.
And clearly the best way to win the information war against an adversary who says we've traded away our values for comfort, riches, and decadence is to throw away the First Amendment because "propaganda works."
Keep in mind, we're not just talking about accounts used by actual terrorists to coordinate actual attacks. We're talking about "pro-ISIS" Twitter accounts.
How will we decide who is pro-ISIS? I propose a system of hearings, with the most important ones conducted by a senate committee. The most important question at these hearings will be "are you now or have ever been a sympathizer with Islamic State." If they "fail" the hearing we could put them in some kind of database used by employers and government hiring agents and so forth. A sort of blacklist, if you will.
And anyone on the blacklist doesn't get to use corporate media platforms. It's not a First Amendment violation, you see, because it's VOLUNTARY. Just ask these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
I answered the question "why shut them down, when they provide valuable information".
I didn't say that I want all pro-terrorist accounts to be shut down. I only explained the reasons behind it.
The fact that some position has valid reasons behind it doesn't mean that there aren't reasons against it. It also doesn't mean that it's necessarily the right position.
Please, don't argue with a position you assume some commenter expresses and argue with a position someone actually expresses. Case in point: I don't know whether we should or shouldn't close all pro-terrorist accounts. And I know about first amendment, thank you.
Right right, just like the Hollywood blacklist didn't violate anyone's First Amendment rights. (You could have at least read to the end of my comment, lol)
Now you've done it, any second now you'll get a whole army of pro-russia trolls coming in accusing you of bias and having your eyes closed and what not.
I didn't think that was a massive thing, until a girl I went to primary school with in NZ (who, it turns out, is ethnic Russian) jumped on me for daring to suggest that Russia's paid internet trolls are a bit of a joke. There was no reasoning, she just kept quoting zerohedge and RT links at me, ignoring anything I said. I just blocked her, but it was so weird to actually be confronted with the effects of this propoganda.
All media is biased, etc. The important thing is to understand the bias when you're reading.
To sibling: only Fox News is owned by Murdoch. You can google for who owns what instead of guessing. MSNBC is biased to the (American) left and CNN is biased to insipidness. All are biased to the establishment and to distract, sensationalism.
Fox has been kicking CNN etc.'s asses in a commercial sense for decades now. We'd be fools to think that hasn't affected the other networks' reporting. We'd also be fools to think that Fox and MSNBCSBCNC operate from different ends of a spectrum. It's all USA all the time, on both networks. For an alternative try RT or Al Jazeera.
wait, anybody actually things about any US big media (cnbc, cnn, fox and whatnot) to be NOT biased and quite heavily? they are all under murdoch empire, no?
generally, within boundaries of popular news sources, one should use a foreign source to get information for a given country. now finding which one is +-balanced for given country is a tricky thing, and probably not constant as time goes by
Oh, I know some people who actually managed these guys. And a lot of SMM people who were involved in projects associated with pro-government political forces. Every one of them a nice guy who understands it all, but just needs cash in a harsh industry. At least, that's what they say.
Yes it's disappointing to see the focus on "bad" speech rather than on violence, because it makes the goals of Western government authorities a little too obvious. If they actually wanted to discourage sectarian violence, they'd be happy to have an easily searchable online resource to which the goatfuckers voluntarily post useful information like techniques, PII, etc.
Authorities' current efforts seem to be more of an attempt to sweep this stuff under the rug. If all this is hidden from the general public, we might be less inclined to scrutinize their bullshit. For all the money and human rights they've consumed here, and the hundreds of thousands killed over there, their various strategies seem to have made the alleged problem worse in every respect. That seems like something we should talk about?
I can't remember where I read the article, but it summarized it as thus. Al Queda was a big threat, but you hardly ever heard of people being radicalized by them. ISIS on the other hand is clearly quite efficient at radicalizing people though. Part of the reason for this is their relatively large social media presence, and their videography is actually quite decent for what they do. If you compare ISIS and Al Queda in this respect, ISIS is definitely "easier to get into" I'd say.
Back when al-Qaeda was the focus of attention, you heard plenty about people, including Americans and other Westerners, being radicalized by them and/or via a system of radical madrassas (mostly in Pakistan) and radical networks (throughout the world) associated with them and their ideology.
It's true that the mechanisms were different, because social media wasn't a big thing at the time: John Walker Lindh was radicalized before the services that really made "social media" a global force existed.
> Part of the reason for this is their relatively large social media presence, and their videography is actually quite decent for what they do.
Not to take any merit from your argument but AQ was good in recruiting online at least for its franchise or affiliate in Yemen under the leadership of the US-born Anwar Awlaki. This is the man who made online propaganda and media blitz as a core element of Islamic terrorism and Jihadism strategy.
Also, please note that Al-Qaeda in Iraq was the progenitor of ISIS but they broke away due to ideological and strategical differences with Ayman Zwahiri the No. 1 AQ leader and they were very hardened under AQ sponsorship.
> Also, please note that Al-Qaeda in Iraq was the progenitor of ISIS
It wasn't so much a "progenitor of ISIS" as the name taken by the group that later called itself "the Islamic State in Iraq" (and later still, "the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria", and most recently simply "the Islamic State") during the period in which that group (which had been around quite some time previously) adopted the al-Qaeda brand.
I would want to compare the numbers with the two during similar timelines; their ramp up, once they became known internationally, once they became a big enough concern to directly target, and then on their decline. Plus I would wonder if there's something along the lines of the new one feeding off the older.
Hell, why not just make a social network JUST for terrorists with no threat of shutting anybody down and then just tap into that info?