OUR PICKSIslamic State “Emoji” Tactics | 1,000-Mile Cannon | Preparing for Cyber Future, and more
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Islamic State Evolves ’Emoji’ Tactics to Peddle Propaganda Online (Mark Scott, Politico)
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.
