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

Will Facebook, Google and Twitter ban jihadists from using their platforms?

Nine European countries are meeting in Milan on July 8 to discuss coordinating action to prevent jihadists returning from Syria to utilize social media to spread their jihad message. Over two thousand Europeans have voluntarily gone to Syria to fight Asaad.

Ivo Opstelten, the Dutch minister of security and justice, said the companies must make greater efforts to ban Islamic militants from using their platforms for recruitment and propaganda.

"Many companies might have [clauses against jihadist statements] in their terms of service, but they don't act," he said in a letter to lawmakers. "These companies must live up to their own rules on postings and delete propaganda of violent jihadists," he said.

Frau Katz has more here.