Islamic State terrorist group evolves emoji tactics to peddle propaganda online
The Islamic State has a new weapon in spreading hate speech and violent content online: the emoji.
Over the past two months, Facebook pages in Arabic, Kurdish and English have used these digital images to sidestep Facebook’s content rules.
Emojis have been used instead of words like “weapon,” “explosion” and “rocket” to champion the Islamic State’s terrorist attacks across the Middle East and farther afield.
These pages, posing as mainstream media organizations with mundane names like World News and Media Point, have collectively racked up hundreds of thousands of likes, shares and comments, based on research shared with POLITICO.
The fake news outlets are part of a sophisticated digital disinformation campaign that includes deploying different tactics across Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Telegram channels.
Islamic State-affiliated channels, all told, have almost 80,000 followers. Some of the social media content has been available since June 2020, primarily focusing on spreading hate speech in Iraq and Syria by sharing news about ISIS attacks from the group’s official mouthpieces.
Much of the ISIS content reviewed by POLITICO is still online — and none of it should be available on social media, based on platforms’ own rules against terrorist content.
“They are linked to a wider unofficial ISIS news ecosystem that has figured out specific evasion tactics, even despite [social media] takedowns, to thrive and to continue to do so,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism. Ayad discovered the terrorist groups across all three platforms and shared his findings with POLITICO.
“ISIS supporters have figured out a way to use multiple platforms in an increasingly sophisticated way,” he added. “Why would they develop an emoji code to describe certain things on Facebook and not use that same emoji code on Telegram? It’s about using different tactics.”
The groups are weaponizing blindspots within each social media platforms’ content policies to promote a hateful and violent ideology, according to two national security officials and three researchers who track online jihadist material.
For Facebook, that includes replacing terrorist language with emojis. For Twitter, that involves toning down the content in English compared with what’s posted in Arabic. For Telegram, it means copying directly from official ISIS material. It’s an evolving cat-and-mouse battle with tech companies and national security agencies.
The combination of different platforms also allows jihadist groups to reach the widest possible audience while portraying themselves as part of a legitimate political organization. Alternative networks like Telegram provide a place to coordinate tactics, while a more mainstream platform like Facebook is used to disseminate often toned-down propaganda so that such messaging can circumvent the platform’s content-moderation tools.
“They are very sophisticated. They are very aware of what they are doing,” said Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu, a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University’s Center for Communication and Public Policy.
In response, Facebook declined to comment but said it was investigating the accounts. Representatives for Twitter and Telegram did not respond to requests for comment.
Tech companies, even when they’ve been slow to remove material from Western extremists, have aggressively removed tens of thousands of accounts with close ties to ISIS, the Taliban or other jihadist groups, often working closely with national security agencies to weed out such material.
It has not always been successful. Internal Facebook documents, made public by Frances Haugen, a company whistleblower, disclosed how the company repeatedly failed to protect its Arabic-language users from terrorist-related material. In response, Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said it had invested heavily in content moderation based in the Middle East.
Still, extremists have quickly evolved to stay ahead of the game, taking advantage of little cooperation between the tech companies to clamp down on campaigns that rely on several social media networks.
Meili Criezis, a graduate fellow at American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab who tracks ISIS online propaganda, said these groups often use backup social media accounts in case their main channels are removed.
“They always have a backup channel that you would be able to link from one to another,” added Criezis, who was not associated with the work provided to POLITICO by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, but who independently uncovered part of the same ISIS-linked digital disinformation campaign.
“For ISIS, it’s important because they see themselves as a global caliphate. So that’s why these media channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram, are important to keep on,” she said.
In late January, ISIS militants carried out a violent prison break in Hasakah, Syria — and showed their digital disinformation apparatus in action.
On Telegram, the fake media outlets began sharing a specific ISIS hashtag the terrorist group was using to coordinate its messaging around the attack, which led to 10 days of fighting within the Syrian city. They also repurposed photos and other social media content directly from the jihadists’ official propaganda machine, often keeping the ISIS logo on the social media posts shared within Telegram.
On Twitter, the Arabic-language accounts were openly supportive of the prison break, both sharing the ISIS hashtag and praising the “Caliphate State.” Yet in English, where the social media company’s online content tools are more advanced, those accounts were more muted, merely referring to the militants as “Muslims coming together.”
On Facebook, the pages relied on their emoji codebook to herald the attack, splicing in the digital images to describe terms associated with ISIS. They also posted a lengthy video of the prison break, which has garnered almost 90,000 views, taken from the viewpoint of the militants as they scattered into the Syrian city.
The accounts, channel and pages on all three social networks repeatedly shared each other’s content, as well as that of affiliated social media users who spread the material to a wide online audience.
“What is going on here is something completely new,” said Ayad, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue researcher who discovered the network. “It’s a multiplatform, multilingual tactic that’s using fake news organizations and different content strategies. The goal appears to be to sustain an online presence without being detected.”
Source: Politico
