How a US Team Uses Facebook, Guerrilla Marketing to Peel Off Potential ISIS Recruits by Joby Warrick, Washington Post
Sometime today, a teenager in Tunis will check his smartphone for the latest violent video from the Islamic State. But the images that pop up first will be of a different genre: young Muslims questioning the morality of terrorists who slaughter innocents and enslave girls for sex.
“Don’t you kill our own Muslim brothers?” a mop-haired youth asks a terrorist recruiter in one animated video showing up on Arabic Facebook accounts in North Africa. “So much of this, it doesn’t seem right.”
The video is one of several paid ads that are turning up on millions of cellphones and computer screens in countries known to be top recruiting grounds for the Islamic State. The ads offer a harrowing view of life inside the self-proclaimed caliphate, sometimes with photos or cartoons and often in the words of refugees and defectors who warn others to stay away.
Most of them make no mention of the ads’ sponsor: a small unit inside the State Department that is using guerrilla marketing tactics to wage ideological warfare against the Islamic State. U.S. officials are using Facebook profile data to find young Muslims who show an interest in jihadist causes. Then they bombard them with anti-terrorism messages that show up whenever the youths go online.
Other government agencies have tried unsuccessfully to compete with militant jihadists in cyberspace. But officials at the State Department’s new Global Engagement Center say they’re the first to tap into the Internet’s vast stores of personal information to discourage individual users from joining the Islamic State…
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A group of counterterrorism…
A group of counterterrorism agents in Germany have developed a new strategy to combat the Islamic State’s recruitment efforts on social media. You can check these online marketing tips that get more help in marketing strategery. They have established Facebook pages and an internet outreach campaign, which are staffed by independent marketers that specialize in propaganda. The goal is to directly address potential recruits while they are still building their networks on Facebook and other social media platforms long before any sort of radicalization has taken place.