The Militarization of Social Media: What Does This Mean For The Millennials?

Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram seem to most Americans a day-to-day blur of status updates, photos, and comments. There are about 500 million tweets per day and 200 billion, yes billion, tweets per year. According to the American Press Institute 88% of Millennials get news from Facebook. For many social media is a way to learn and connect, and for others it is a way to radicalize and recruit. This duality of social media is going to cause some issues. ISIS’s social media campaign does two specific things to the digital generation: targets and desensitizes them.

This past year ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, shocked the world when it used social media to not only recruit new members, but to publicly execute western journalists. ISIS has weaved its way into the everyday lives of Americans, specifically young adults. Before ISIS’s social media campaign, many Americans believed terrorists could only infiltrate western societies through terror attacks. ISIS has demonstrated it is capable of creeping into American lives during their morning scroll through Twitter. Social media is the driving force behind the terrorist organization’s success. ISIS’s social media presence is extremely calculated in hopes of recruiting the most amount of supporter. The group portrays a “better life…in the caliphate as compared to the corrupt west.” ISIS gives recruits a sense of identity through militaristic camaraderie, and the group’s success in recruiting foreigners is reflected in the numbers. Recent reports have estimated 12,000 to 15,000 foreigners in the ranks of ISIS. The group’s social media presence makes it more accessible than other terrorist organizations, such as Al Qaeda or Hamas; the Brookings Institute conducted an “ISIS Twitter Census” in which they estimated there to be 46,000 overt ISIS supporter accounts on twitter, and those accounts averaged 1,004 followers, more than a typical twitter account. So what does the militarization of social media mean for the generation that has made social media thrive? Well, Millennials are most at risk of being influenced by ISIS’s manipulation because they have the most media presence. According to the American Press Institute 88% of Millennials get news from Facebook, which makes them a prime target for propaganda.

The millennial generation has to adapt to the changing nature of social media. In recent years, Twitter and Facebook have become intricate platforms for the dissemination of information. ISIS can spread propaganda much more rapidly through twitter; the organization has changed the social media game. ISIS has uploaded graphic videos of beheadings and mass shootings, and the sad part is that is common knowledge because it was all over the World Wide Web. The ISIS videos and threats were shocking when they first started, but after a year it stopped inciting the same response. ISIS has made dehumanizing acts a norm on social media over the past year. No one is shocked when they post a new video of a beheading. However most people choose not to watch them, but they know the videos exist. Even more alarming is that ISIS has created an infrastructure for other

organizations to build upon on how to manipulate and disseminate radical ideology throughout Western societies without setting foot outside the Middle East. Social media before ISIS looked very different from social media after ISIS. The platform that was once filled with mainly funny posts and tweets now has become a breeding ground for radicals. Twitter has always been a platform for the diffusion of ideas, but now the propagated ideas carry a heavier message. ISIS has changed the way we look at social media; they have made social media into their own battle ground.