Online activists fight ISIS with Twitter suspensions, anime

WASHINGTON (Sinclair Broadcast Group) -- Online activists are deploying some surprising strategies to combat ISIS propaganda, and while some experts are applauding their initiative, they are also questioning how much U.S. officials can learn from their efforts.

The "hacktivist" group Anonymous and its allies have exposed thousands of Twitter users they claim are supporting ISIS in recent months, reporting them to administrators, and getting their accounts shut down.

A BBC report Tuesday claimed that some ISIS accounts identified by Anonymous have been flooded with images of Japanese anime characters.

Twitter user isisvipper claimed those images were the work of their "Google-bombing team," not Anonymous.

"ISIS-chan," as users call the anime images, appears to have originated on Japanese message boards in January when a journalist and contractor from Japan were held hostage and executed by the terrorists.

According to the Daily Dot, it was one of several memes that developed in Japan at the time attempting to ridicule and emasculate ISIS by replacing terrorists with anime characters in photos or replacing their weapons with sex toys.

There are now hundreds of ISIS-chan posts spread across social media, including tweets, Tumblr and Facebook accounts, and YouTube videos.

The images frequently show a cartoon girl dressed as a militant dancing or cutting and eating melons.

Some involve photos of cute animals with terrorist outfits drawn on them.

Rules for creating ISIS-chan images posted by users on Twitter emphasize that the intent is not to mock or insult Islam but to disrupt the propaganda being put out by ISIS.

"Confused by #ISISchan? She's about reinventing the lunatic fringe as the absurd cartoon that they are," one tweet says.

A post on Pastebin explains the logic behind the ISIS-chan "Google-bombing" as an attempt to manipulate search engine algorithms so these cartoons appear above the sites promoting real ISIS propaganda in search results.

It is difficult to determine how successful the Google-bombing effort has been. Searching for "ISIS-chan" Wednesday brought up over 56,000 results, but the highest results in a search for ISIS-related images only appear after scrolling through hundreds of real ISIS photos, many of which are very graphic and disturbing.

"It's important to note that's better than nothing," said Emerson Brooking, a DC-based research associate for the Council for Foreign Relations.

Brooking said there is simply too much new ISIS content generated every day for this strategy to effectively overshadow that, but it is noble-minded and it does present a way for average citizens to feel like they are contributing to the fight against ISIS.

"It's their opportunity to feel empowered, like they can do something, no matter how small it is," he said.

Attempts by activists to single out Twitter users sympathetic to ISIS and get their accounts suspended seem to be more successful, but the strategic value of those actions is not entirely clear.

The Anonymous campaign against ISIS has been going on since 2014, but efforts were stepped up earlier this year after the January terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices in Paris.

In March, Anonymous revealed over 9,200 Twitter accounts it claimed were linked to ISIS. Earlier this month, the hacktivists posted over 500 more accounts they "exposed and destroyed."

"ISIS; We will hunt you, Take down your sites, Accounts, Emails, and expose you," one post listing alleged ISIS supporters' Twitter accounts stated.

Accounts associated with Anonymous and its allies actively monitor users who support ISIS and urge their followers to report them for suspension. When users who have previously been suspended resurface, the group calls them out again.

J.M. Berger, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of ISIS: The State of Terror, told the BBC these suspensions disrupt the ISIS propaganda network and force supporters to waste time and bandwidth reestablishing their presence.

Emerson Brooking agreed that these efforts have been effective in disrupting some communications and making it more difficult for ISIS supporters to regenerate their accounts and link back up.

"For them, it's about doing something from where they are," he said, but they likely realize they are not directly impacting the battle on the ground in the Middle East.

"If they made one person reconsider traveling to Syria, or if they could just prevent some of these images from proliferating as rapidly as they do, they would consider it a job well done."

Experts have said one of the many unique challenges the U.S. faces in combating ISIS is finding a way to counter its aggressive and sophisticated social media propaganda campaigns. Researchers say the actions taken by Anonymous and others could provide some examples to follow.

Brooking noted that the Anonymous campaign illustrates "organizational flexibility and appreciating new ways in which you can leverage people who share your objective."

Official attempts to create "counter-narratives" like the State Department's "Think Again Turn Away" campaign have not been very well-received.

"It's not that ISIS is so great. It is that the response against ISIS is both limited, and weak," Ambassador Alberto Fernandez, former head of the government's Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, told CBS News last month.

John Cohen, former counterterrorism coordinator for the Department of Homeland Security and currently a professor at Rutgers University, said the government is ineffective at producing counter-narratives on social media. He suggested it is more valuable to focus on why ISIS propaganda is resonating so much to begin with.

According to Dr. Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, the government and social media networks need to work together to provide alternatives to ISIS propaganda and supply information and answers that serve to "counter-groom" potential terrorist recruits.

Brooking suggested that the government should serve as a "convener and mediator" for social media companies and administrators to find ways to at least reduce the visibility of terrorist propaganda, but it needs to be done without impeding freedom of speech.

Figuring out exactly how to do that is a challenge the government continues to struggle with.

An internal State Department document leaked to the New York Times in June indicates a failure of coalition allies to communicate effectively.

"When it comes to the external message, our narrative is being trumped by ISIL's. We are reactive--we think about 'counter-narratives,' not 'our narrative,'" wrote Richard Stengel, under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs.

Some experts believe that monitoring ISIS communications on social media could be more valuable than just shutting them all down.

A Brookings Institution report published in March, "The ISIS Twitter Census," attempted to measure the effectiveness of suspending ISIS-related accounts.

The report, by J.M Berger and Jonathon Morgan, grapples with balancing freedom of speech, the danger posed by ISIS propaganda, and the potential intelligence value of some of the information posted on these accounts.

"There is clear intelligence value to be extracted from the ISIS accounts we examined," they wrote, particularly from accounts that provided reliable GPS coordinates inside ISIS territories.

Also, some smaller accounts were found to have information about local events as they happened and others provided an advance look at ISIS media releases. Monitoring combined feeds revealed the importance of certain themes and issues in ISIS propaganda.

ISIS "cannot accomplish its propaganda, recruitment, and operational missions on Twitter without exposing itself to scrutiny," they wrote. Some of the most useful information was found on obscure accounts with small followings.

However, with tens of thousands of ISIS supporters on Twitter, the researchers concluded it is possible to suspend some accounts with strong propaganda value without limiting intelligence.

Experts agree the government does need to step up the battle against ISIS on social media, and recent developments suggest some lawmakers are prepared to act.

The House of Representatives passed a bill last week that would require the Director National Intelligence to produce a report on terrorist use of social media. If the legislation is enacted, the report would assess issues like the role of social media in radicalization, the intelligence value of terrorists' social media posts, and the national security threat posed by public availability of terrorist content on social media.

A proposal under consideration in the Senate would require social media companies to report terrorist activity to the government, according to Defense One. The language of the legislation is unclear about what exactly would qualify as "terrorist activity" and when that requirement would kick in.

Kalev Leetaru, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security suggested that strategies like the Anonymous campaigns and ISIS-chan Google-bombing could be very effective if deployed on a larger scale. They would also raise serious ethical questions, though, particularly if the U.S. government was directly involved.

Right now, he said, anyone who is curious can find out information about ISIS and possibly even make contact with recruiters, using as an example a recent New York Times story about an American girl who was nearly recruited by ISIS after reaching out to people on social media.

"A few keyword searches and you've got everything you need to know," he said.

"ISIS is on the offensive. They're not having to do any defense whatsoever" online. Shutting down their accounts and forcing them to constantly rebuild, publicize their new accounts, and reestablish followers changes that paradigm, he said.

He imagines what would happen if Anonymous or others like them created fake accounts with similar names to the ones that have been shut down, but posting fake information and links to fake videos, creating distrust about what content is real.

"Imagine if they start pumping out huge volumes of material," using the same hashtags and handles as ISIS, making it too much work for the casual follower to determine what is authentic.

"You kind of start whittling it down," he said.

A bunch of hacktivists and volunteers doing this is one thing. The government participating in it would be something very different.

"Is fighting terrorism really worth giving up that moral high ground?" Leetaru said.

He pointed to reports that the Russian government pays bloggers and commenters who attempt to flood the internet with pro-Russian memes and propaganda, drowning out critics of Vladimir Putin's government.

"It forces people to think very carefully" before posting anti-government material, but it is not necessarily an example the U.S. should follow.

"Is that what we want to aspire to as Americans?" he asked. "Where do you kind of draw that line?"

If the efforts of groups like Anonymous and the ISIS-chan posters turned out to be effective and there was proof these strategies worked, that might give the government some leeway to pursue similar practices. It could still be hard to sell to the public, though, and there is still the question of whether valuable intelligence information would be lost along the way.

Leetaru warned that a change in the approach to fighting ISIS online is necessary, though, predicting that the terrorist group will eventually recruit their own very talented hackers.

Instead of just defacing or shutting down a website like they do now, a terrorist with a laptop in the middle of the desert could someday be able to cut off a power grid in the U.S. or even hack into people's cars.

"How do you counter that?" Leetaru asked. "Ultimately we're going to have to explore more of those types of issues."