How ISIS Is Taking War to Social Media

ISIS goes viral - and the world fights back.

- Emerson Brooking & P.W. Singer

When the militants of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh) descended on the Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014, they didn’t just march into town—they simultaneously launched a Twitter hashtag campaign, #AllEyesonISIS. It was blitzkrieg with a digital-marketing strategy.

Within hours, images of ISIS barbarity spread throughout the Arab world, sowing fear among Mosul’s residents and its defenders. The social-media campaign gave an air of inevitability to the looming seizure of the city, and to the atrocities that would follow. Despite the fact that they outnumbered the attacking ISIS forces by 15-to-1, the Iraqi army units defending Mosul disintegrated and fled. A militia of roughly 1,500 ISIS fighters captured a city of some 1.5 million people.

From its start, social media has been integral to ISIS’s rise. It allows the group to raise its prestige among terror organizations, and to overtake older jihadist competitors like al-Qaeda. It serves to coordinate troops and win battles. And it allows the group to administer territory it controls.