How ISIS is using Citizen Media

With the creation of the Internet the hope was that it would bring a unprecedented wave of freedom. An even more interconnected world, would not allow for hate or fear to exist with the never ending surveillance of the Internet.

However in June 2014, the Islamic Militant group called ISIS or ISIL launched a Twitter campaign under #AllEyesonISIS, which they created prior to their conquering on the Iraq city of Mosul in 2014. Rather than a blitzkrieg of individual soldiers it can be described as a potent digital marketing attack. This mass dumping of digital marketing on social media allowed Mosul residents and their army, to perceive the looming capture and demise of their city as undeniable. Rather than the Mosul soldiers having confidents in their numbers, the army fled the the city even though they out numbered the radical Islamic group 15 to 1. This victory raised the prestige of the terrorist group within the middle east and throughout the globe. However, ISIS was not done using social media to promote it's radical message, now expanding its extremist war far from it's physical boundaries, with use of Twitter, Facebook and citizen media.

While longterm, ISIS has created and populated the Twitter digital sphere to encourage young people to support the organization and provide the perception that this radical Islamic movement has similar characteristics to a "grassroots" movement. ISIS populates the social media sphere with sophisticated and quality produced videos in order to attract citizens from Canada, United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Therefore, this use of social media "has proven to be an extremely valuable tool for the terrorist organization and perfectly suited for the very audience it's intending to target...[with] 89% of adults aged 18-29 use social media...platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and even Youtube" (Blacker, 1).

ISIS' propaganda machine has continuously produced Hollywood esque movies, that imitate actions films, which are obvious ploys to attract young Westerner viewers. The videos are usually in the moment footage accumulated together and translated into multiple European languages as well as English. These videos, on social media, are medieval but they have had a stunning affect on successfully recruiting young individuals in these western nations to convert to Islam and to run away and join the the jihadist group. Individuals including: Aqsa Mahmood (Scotland) and Shannon Conley (United States) (Blacker, 5).

ISIS' use of citizen media to spread their radical messages have proven that though the Internet is a great avenue to promote peace, it can also be used promote: hate, distrust, and terrorism. However, it is interesting to see that ISIS has used citizen media as one of their major pillars for their movement, and realizing that these outlets enable citizens in the western world to engage with radical Islamic thought, which are messages highly criticized by the western countries (Warner, 2002).

#BlackLivesMatter

The "Shot Heard Round the World"- the first line in the Concord Hymn by Ralph Emerson to describe the impending moments that began the American Revolution. Almost 240 years later the United States has witnessed a new revolution but this grassroots movement is not demanding the emancipation of an institutional monarch but rather the enfranchisement from an embedded institutional racism.

After a young black man, named Michael Brown, was wrongfully shot and killed in Ferguson Missouri, the small city became a hub for activism under the banner #BlackLivesMatter, which has also sparked an organized global political and social movement. The 21st century act of violence, which also brought global attention was not circulated through a written text but rather broadcasted through a digital outlet, never imagined by those alive during the first American Revolution. Unlike the first revolution, this second grassroots movement is not being played out on a distant battle field but rather through a digital medium such as Facebook and Twitter, which was made available through the creation of the Internet.

Prior to the Internet and social media, if urgent news had to be publicized about a particular incident, individuals would have to rely on mainstream media corporations to broadcast the message. As quoted by Wired in their piece, Social Media Helps Black Lives Matter Fight the Power, by Bijan Stephen, 

              "In the 1960s, if you were a civil rights worker stationed in the Deep South and you 

                needed to get some urgent news out to the rest of the world- word of a beating or an 

               activist's arrest or some brewing state of danger- you would likely head straight for a 

              

               telephone... in other words, it took a lot of infrastructure to live-tweet what was going

               

                on in the streets of the Jim Crow South." 

However, it was in the mass media's hands to decide whether the incident would be "news" worthy or not, and this determination was largely affected by the interests and biases of each media corporation. Thus, for a large social movement to be successful it is predominantly shaped by the technology available to those in charge of the movement, in order for it to tailor its goals, tactics and rhetoric with the media available (Bijan 2015).  

Social media has provided an arena for individuals to post videos and their insights without the struggles of providing the video to a media station. In a way every individual with a smart phone is a citizen journalists, they bring to light the wrong doings by state actors, without the fears of corporate and political agents. Like Martin Luther King Jr. mentions in New York in 1965, during the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, "We will no longer let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners...we're going to make them do it in the glaring light of television"(Bijan 2015). With social media, no longer did activists have to force the spotlight on a particular incident, social media would be the avenue where citizen journalists could post live and raw footage. Citizen media would be the continuos spotlight for which institutional actors would be perpetually surveyed. 

However, though citizen media does provide a certain level of visibility and did have a certain measure of success for the Black Lives Matter movement, for example it "helped pressure the federal government to investigate police practices in Ferguson and Baltimore....and [helped create] an offshoot...movement, a project called Campaign Zero" (Bijan 2015). 

However, this it will need a certain level of institutional support in order to be sustainable and have an actual tangible affect on society. Citizen media has helped bring the issue to attention but "the movement doesn't win if there's only a small set of people who understand the solutions...the movement wins when there's a broad understanding that we need a system that doesn't kill people, when a critical mass of citizens can envision what that looks like" (Bijan 2015). Therefore, citizen media provides a brief and at times strong spotlight but if actual change is going to occur, institutions needs to support the movement as well. 

Trump and Citizen Media

Donald Trump won the citizen media war.

According to Google, Trump was searched 3 times more than Hilary Clinton. He had 4 million more Twitter followers than Clinton. Why do these facts matter?

A recent study was done by the University of California and Stanford University, which highlighted that 42 percent of American television viewers ignore or turn to another channel in order to avoid watching campaign commercials. Why is this?

Well the reason being is that there is an increasing spread of distrust for American mainstream media. The University of California and Stanford University also highlighted that only 1 and 4 of millennial voters said that they collected political knowledge from television ads. Proof that young viewers are becoming more aware of the information they are consuming and have been relying on other sources such as social media or third party media outlets to inform themselves. John Fiske, the philosophic academic explained, "that our media resources are limited and will always be so, [as long as] they are [commercially] reliant on corporate sponsorship" (Fiske, 1996). However, this past American election has proven that politicians and their teams are becoming more aware of this change and have adapted their political marketing tactics to appeal to younger audiences.

Trump's ascendance as a political candidate can largely be credited to his rise on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Prior to this campaign social media was beneficial for politicians because it allowed them to identify and target individual voters, while extracting donations. However, it can be said that Trump's team took a couple pointers from Obama's two campaigns and used social media to not only inform but to recruit energetic supporters. Trump's often raciest, misogynist and profane tweets were seen as honest, transparent and bold, as compared to Hilary Clinton's campaign that was often too calculated and lacked transparency.

Trump mastered Twitter, with the New York Times estimating that by Trump using citizen media he had provided himself and his campaign up to $2billion of free marketing. Though his tweets often lacked truth, it did not seem to bother his followers for Trump had targeted the increasing resentment and distrust towards large corporate media institutions. By the end of the campaign, Trump's followers had believed that mass media institutions and the Democrat party had been sold out to corporate lobbyists and no longer represented the ordinary American citizen. Thus, to Trump followers kept repeating his common narratives of factual falsehoods and racist rhetoric, which created an insurmountable political movement.

For decades political theorists wondered have citizen media would affect politics by examining the past three elections: 2008, 2012 and 2016 the results are down-founding. Trump, like Obama before him, used citizen media as his main pillar for his political campaign, realizing that these outlets engage and motivate individuals unlike any other media outlet seen previously.

The press used to be a bastion of free and fair speech. with the death of print and radio news, television and media news took its place, but as shown above, but these current media outlets now lack the truthful expression that they once may of carried in the 1960's for example. Thus it is becoming more and more clear that the internet social media circles are like those of the market, or old public sphere. They are the keepers of honest, and open expression - whether its a medium we truly want is not my choice to say. But what I can say is it seems to have been the medium more of America chose to use within this past election.

Hyperlink Essay: The Internet, a Healthy Public Sphere or just a Digital Marketing Platform?

With the creation of the Internet, the expectation by users was that it would bring an unprecedented social realm for free speech. As described by Habermas, the Public Sphere is made up of private people gathered together as a public and discussing the needs of society. However, the debate of whether the Internet is an example of a Public Sphere, is still being evaluated. Greg Goldberg expresses that the Internet is at a tipping point; it will either be labeled as a recreated Public Sphere or it could become absorbed into the capitalist commercial culture (Goldberg, 2010). This fight for the digital space is ongoing, with various social activists struggling to keep the Internet free and away from state and corporate control. Theorists have attempted to label this space as either a digital Public Sphere or a digital marketing platform, but the Internet is an unprecedented phenomenon, which one currently cannot define.

In 2011, Aaron Swartz a former MIT student and political activist began a digital crusade to stop the passing of an Internet regulation bill and a battle to keep the digital space free. This bill was titled SOPA. Using citizen media, Swartz produced a critical speech titled Freedom to Connect, to spread his message, and under #FreedomtoConnect, he began his political movement. In this inspirational speech he highlighted that if the government “wanted to come up with some way… to shut down access to particular websites, [SOPA] might be the only way [they could] do it” (para. 17). One senator claimed, “people on the Internet, think they can get away with anything…[t]here’s [has] to be laws on the Internet! It’s [has] to be under control!" (para. 15) This statement was very alarming, even after the bill was eliminated, large media outlets still refused to cover the story, as if it was not a critical issue (para. 16).

Media conglomerates tasked with informing the public, on SOPA, were rather utilized as a tool to frame the bill as unimportant, in order for it to be easily passed. However, this strange behaviour did not surprise John Fiske, who explains, “that our media resources are limited and will always be so, [as long as] they are [commercially] reliant on corporate sponsorship” (Fiske, 1996). However, regardless of the lack of media focus, the #FreedomtoConnect campaign blossomed, within a couple weeks 300, 000 individuals signed the online petition to end the controversial bill. As described by John Downing “the vast variety of social movement media, operating in direct relation to…social change, represents our best prospect for an alternative, counter hegemonic public sphere” (2010).


Swartz was a strong believer that the World Wide Web should be free and that the flow of information should be accessible to everyone, free of state and corporate control. He used citizen media as his main pillar for this political movement, realizing that these outlets enable citizens to engage with thoughts outside of the prototypical frameworks of society’s institutions (Warner, 2002). Thus, providing individuals with information that is both produced and driven by regular individuals, like himself (Atton, 2003). Swartz was able to organize and successfully facilitate an online movement, which “is hard to predict, let alone engineer” (Morozov, 2011) The defining process for the Internet is still on going but Swartz died fighting for the possibility of a free digital Public Sphere.


Work Cited:


Atton, Chris. “What is ‘Alternative’ Journalism?” Journalism, 4:3, 2003. 267-272


Fiske, John. “Los Angeles: A Tale of Three Videos,” in Media Matters: Politics: Everyday Culture and Political Change, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.


Goldberg, Greg. “Rethinking the Public/Virtual Sphere: The Problem with Participation,” New Media & Society, 13:5, 2011. 739-754.

Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics (abbreviated version)” in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88:4, 2002. 413-425

THE POWER OF CITIZEN MEDIA: 2008 & 2012 OBAMA ELECTION CAMPAIGN

Using the work of Dr. Pamela Rutledge and John Drowning I will provide a real life example of the influence of citizen media. The topic below discusses and affectively supports the themes of a social movement and how social media platforms can be used to aid in social change. 

In 2007 when Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the 2008 election, social media was a new and growing phenomena. Facebook and Twitter had recently been created and their effectiveness in politics was just being understood. All while the world was becoming more mobile, with the development of the smartphone market, which was first introduced by Apple. However, the 2008 election made history, for Obama effectively used social media as one of his major campaign platforms and the main driver for his political revolution.

A recent statistic taken by PEW Survey, discovered that in 2015, 78% of Americans have created and use their various social media accounts. While 66% of Americans have contributed to various political discussions either through Twitter or Facebook. The citizen media landscape has grown and become an avenue for citizens to escape the constant perceptions of mass media conglomerates and voice their political opinions to other like minded individuals. Thus, social media platforms like: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have become an important avenue for adults and more specifically young millennials to gather information about politics, (either through posts, videos and comments) and a space where they can voice their political opinions. The Obama campaign team recognized the growing importance of social media in 2007 and took advantage of this space.

Similar to various past Presidents who used old mass media technology (Television & Radio) to their political advantage, Obama was the first President who embraced social media as a major anchor for both of his campaigns. In 2008 John Macan was social media silent and attempted to use older media, such as television and radio to help get his message across, while Mitt Romney, in 2012, sparing invested in social media platforms. 

Using John Drowning's piece Nanomedia, one can explain that Obama's social media presence helped create such an influential political campaign because individuals were making cultural connections between the videos or posts seen on social media with their own circumstances. Drowning explains that "the relationship between the social networks and cognitive maps [is the ways in] which actors make sense of and categorize their social environment and locate themselves within broader web of ties and interactions." Drowning's explanation of the importance of social media can be further supported with Dr. Rutledge's collected statistics, which is mentioned in the following paragraph. 

Dr. Rutledge in her piece, How Obama Won the Social Media Battle in 2012 Presidential Campaign, highlights numerous fascinating facts about the 2012 election. She found that "in the 2012 election, 30% of online users report that they were urged to vote via social media by family, friends or other social network connections, 20% actively encouraged other and 22% posted their decision when they voted." 

Thus, citizen media shared within social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram gave individuals enough knowledge about Obama's political and agenda, while also feeling in powered to join such an inspirational movement.  


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