It’s unclear how far Elon Musk’s pledge to restore free speech to Twitter will go; it wasn’t long ago that you could easily stumble upon entire ecosystems of online jihadis and their fanboys on the site. As one surrealist Twitter account put it: “i miss ISIS twitter. when u could just get on here and click around for a bit and find some guys in ISIS on here tweeting about it, posting their cool ass trucks and shit”.
Back before Big Tech cracked the whip on jihadis and their online fanboys, it wasn’t uncommon for journalists and analysts to interact directly with terrorists in distant war zones, even building something of a rapport. The bizarre tension of these interactions, between battle-hardened religious fanatics and those on the other side of their celestial war, was not lost on terrorism scholar J.M. Berger. Describing his virtual relationship with an American al-Shabaab fighter, he noted how it became “part of my daily routine… to check in with a terrorist with a professed love of al-Qaida in Somalia on the other side of the world.”
Jihadist groups recognised the enormous and unprecedented potential reach that social media afforded. Posts by Isis fighters formed part of a deliberate grassroots strategy to flood the internet with unofficial propaganda to complement the organisation’s glossier official output.
Initially, Western security services were indulgent toward the tweeting terrorists, thanks largely to the treasure trove of intel they provided. Jihadist recruits would post photographs with easily geolocatable features — treelines, ridges, hills and apartment buildings — and pose for selfies that would haunt them in court many months or years later. Posts also provided valuable insights into internal dynamics and even instability within terrorist groups. The American in al-Shabaab live-tweeted his dispute with the organisation’s mainly Somali leadership, a dispute which ended in his eventual assassination. Leaving jihadis online, it was argued, left them right where we could see them.
The summer of 2014 changed all that.
In June that year, Isis easily overran Mosul — and the US trained and equipped Iraqi forces defending it — and declared a caliphate. This declaration transformed the trickle of foreign fighters joining the group (now a quasi-state) into a flood. In the weeks that followed, “Isis Twitter” was drunk on battlefield triumphalism, apocalypticism and a catalogue of pornographic violence — violence that was “instantly accessible at the click of a mouse.”
Despite a litany of other atrocities, it was the filmed execution of American reporter James Foley in August that prompted decisive action. Here was an act so monstrous, and with such reach, that social media companies changed their content moderation policies almost overnight. “We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery. Thank you”, tweeted Twitter CEO Dick Costolo the morning after a video of the beheading was posted online. Facebook took similar action, mere months after defending its decision to leave videos of cartel atrocities online.
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SubscribeThe link to the Thomas Frank article is well worth reading. A moment of accurate self awareness, published in the Guardian, must be a positive step.
Something that seems to be missing in the Twitter debate is the MSM’s amplifying role. Only 20% of the UK’s population has a Twitter account and only a small percentage of them are activists.
Twitter only matters because mainstream journalists report what this tiny bunch of nutters think as if they represent broad social trends. If journalists were banned from having a Twitter account the whole thing could go back to cat videos.
Progressive fascism.
”Four legs good, two legs bad”
“This phrase, which occurs in Chapter III, constitutes Snowball’s condensation of the Seven Commandments of Animalism, which themselves serve as abridgments of Old Major’s stirring speech on the need for animal unity in the face of human oppression. The phrase instances one of the novel’s many moments of propagandizing, which Orwell portrays as one example of how the elite class abuses language to control the lower classes. Although the slogan seems to help the animals achieve their goal at first, enabling them to clarify in their minds the principles that they support, it soon becomes a meaningless sound bleated by the sheep (“two legs baa-d”), serving no purpose other than to drown out dissenting opinion. By the end of the novel, as the propagandistic needs of the leadership change, the pigs alter the chant to the similar-sounding but completely antithetical “Four legs good, two legs better.””
What part of this does the progressive liberal elite not understand ? Is it just not clever enough, does it lack sufficient buzzwords or incomprehensible gobbledygook ( that horror fore fend, the plebeians might actually understand and call it out for what it actually is). It seems doubly ironic that a book about Stalinism seems to have become a guide book for todays fascist tendencies of the liberal hegemony.
It seems somewhat ironic, that quoting from ‘Animal Farm’ is potentially censored. Even the “Awaiting for approval” seems an odd phrase (I dun know, maybe it’s correct ?). Surely it should read ‘Waiting for approval’ or indeed ‘Awaiting approval’ ? They just seem to be uncertain (almost as if the very notion itself doesn’t quite sit comfortably within themselves) that they gave up deciding which phrase to use, so just plumped for something in between ?
““Awaiting for approval” seems an odd phrase”
The software is probably an off-the-shelf package and was probably written (cheaply) in a country where English isn’t the first language.
Particularly odd as presumably the comments that are allowed to appear are not “approved” merely not found to be sufficiently objectionable to be suppressed.
You must have noticed that to comment on today’s essay on HM the Queen, you have to ‘click again’ , unlike all other of today’s other essays.
This puts your comment before the Chief Imperial Censor, who then ‘slashes and burns’ as he/she thinks fit.
Please Mr Musk, your devoted yet unworthy servants beg you rescue us from this nonsense.
As at 14.41 BST, all discussion on the Good Friday Agreement in today’s Blair essay has been CENSORED.
QED?
GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT comments restored as at:
16.16 BST.
“At 9.25 GMT there are still no comments on that article.”
I’ve noticed the range of total number of comments on most articles is much lower than even a few months ago. I think Unherd is losing readers.