Photographs purportedly showing more than 40 UN peacekeepers seized by Islamist militants on Syria’s side of the Golan Heights – along with their identity cards – have been posted on social media.  The al-Qaeda linked Nusra Front says the captives, all from Fiji, were detained on Thursday because their UN mission was helping Syria’s government and had ignored the suffering of its people. It says they are being treated well.

The extremists who have seized large parts ofSyria and Iraq have riveted the world’s attention with their military prowess and unrestrained brutality. But Western intelligence services are also worried about their extraordinary command of seemingly less lethal weapons: state-of-the-art videos, ground images shot from drones and multilingual Twitter messages.

This may be the best Ice Bucket Challenge to combine the viral video craze with what’s in the news right now.  Militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have been mocked by one social media user who has imitated what an ISIS member would look like if he were to accept the challenge.

The State Department actually has a Twitter account focused on countering some of these jihadis and extremists online and specifically on Twitter. It’s hard to say how effective that is, perhaps it’s better than doing nothing. But we shouldn’t kind of delude ourselves into thinking that public diplomacy can really change people’s minds in a very obvious way. The American government doesn’t have a lot of credibility with anyone who is going to be vaguely sympathetic to the aims of th

Russian officials have responded to a mocking tweet from Canadian delegates over the escalating Ukraine crisis. Diplomatic relations between the two countries have been in the spotlight since Canadian officials posted a snarky map to help Russian soldiers who keep “getting lost in Ukraine”. Moscow officials have hit back with their own map, with the disputed Crimea region clearly marked as Russian territory.

The proliferation of social media has brought extremist ideologues world-wide into closer and more personal contact with potential recruits than antiterror officials ever dreamed possible, but it also has handed Western investigators powerful new tools for tracking potential threats.

In the past week or so, major social media events have included a funeral, a police shooting, and a beheading. I don't mean to suggest that the ceremony for Mike Brown in Ferguson, the shooting of Kajieme Powell a few miles away, or the Islamic State's beheading of James Foley in Syria were primarily social media events. They are all tragedies, which have taken and shattered lives.