When one ISIS-affiliated channel was shut down by the Telegram app on Wednesday, another would pop up. [...] ISIS doesn't appear to rely on any one platform to communicate publicly and privately. But experts have noted a troubling shift, in particular, to Telegram.

The assignments arrive on slips of paper, each bearing the black flag of the Islamic State, the seal of the terrorist group's media emir, and the site of that day's shoot.His footage quickly found a global audience, released online in an Islamic State video that spread on social media and appeared in mainstream news coverage on Al Jazeera and other networks.

So ISIS takes pop culture, or soft power, very very seriously indeed, even if we don't. The attacks on Paris demonstrate their cultural focus most of all. They attacked restaurants, theaters, and sports events rather than military or political targets […] The forces that will defeat ISIS aren't the army, the navy, and the air force; they're Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. They have to involve themselves in the war.

As I explore in a new Brookings paper, a major reason for this level of [ISIS's] recruiting success has been the group’s savvy use of propaganda and social media. Counter-messaging efforts, meanwhile, have been largely ineffective—in part because they are dwarfed by the sheer size of the ISIS communications footprint, but also because they have been too mono-dimensional and static.

Senior U.S. government officials have also acknowledged the importance of winning the war of ideas from the outset. [...] A closer inspection suggests the lessons from the Truth campaign can help improve the West's ability to compete in the CVE war of ideas, particularly in the eyes of young adults.

When it comes to public diplomacy, China might be better off loosening up and developing a sense of humor about itself. Gone are the days of Hu Jintao’s “smile diplomacy,” which aimed to convince the world that it had nothing to fear from a rising China. 

Mao Zedong was said to have been moved to tears when he watched an early performance of "The White-Haired Girl," an opera created to meet his call for rousing revolutionary art. And under President Xi Jinping, a revival is on the road, reinvented once more to appeal to a Communist Party leader's stringently ideological tastes.