Social media helped create an army that established a new state.

Jason Pontin writes at MIT Technology Review,

... a “decentralized” social-media campaign by ISIS, supported by sympathizers in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, who repost ISIS’s gruesome videos or produce videos in their own languages that inflame local tribal and national grievances in an effort to join their regions to the self-declared caliphate. The reason we care about ISIS’s social-media campaign is that it has been an animating force in recruiting about 25,000 people to fight in Syria and Iraq, at least 4,500 of them from Europe and North America.

...we shouldn’t be too surprised that a youth revolt used the preferred tools of the young: “The young make up the bulk of these movements, and inevitably they bring youth’s character to their fight for change … Organizing or attending protests gets fitted between flirting, studying, and holding down a job. Action for this generation is as likely to be mediated through screens … as face to face.”

...The inescapable conclusion is that only widespread rejection of ISIS on social media by other young Muslims is likely to effectively counter ISIS’s own social-media campaign.

Read more here.

h/t Glenn Reynolds