Pentagon gets green light for WAR ... of web propaganda against IS

US Congress approves funds for 'creative and agile concepts' to tackle Daesh

The Pentagon has been given formal approval to start an online propaganda campaign against the Islamic State following a recent push by the US Department of Defense (DoD).

Congress approved the National Defense Authorization Act for 2016 last week and included in it a whole section (1056) on "Information operations and engagement technology demonstrations."

The section states that the Secretary of Defense "should develop creative and agile concepts, technologies, and strategies across all available media to most effectively reach target audiences, and to counter and degrade the ability of adversaries and potential adversaries to persuade, inspire, and recruit inside areas of hostilities or in other areas in direct support of the objectives of commanders."

In other words: counter the unexpectedly sophisticated and effective propaganda machine that the Islamic State has put into place in Iraq and Syria.

The section authorizes the Pentagon to carry out these operations for seven years – until October 2022 – and notes that it expects funding requests in that time: "The Secretary of Defense should request additional funds in future budgets to carry out military information support operations to support the broader efforts of the Government to counter violent extremism."

Concerted effort

The inclusion of an online propaganda program is not an accident: the DoD has carried out a carefully coordinated effort for just that in the build-up to the defense act.

At the end of October, senior officials testified to Congress about the need to counter propaganda, which garnered some press attention. Just to make sure, the DoD then put out a press release saying the same thing: that "the United States is facing an unprecedented challenge in countering the propaganda of adversaries who recruit and easily spread misinformation through the Internet."

A month later and a week before the Act was signed off into law, the Washington Post ran a special report on the Islamic State's propaganda program as well as a critical review of the (DoD rival) State Department's efforts thus far at countering it.

The Post was connected to Islamic State defectors by "security officials and counterterrorism experts." It based its report on the information those defectors and the security officials provided.

Not that the requests and concerns are not justified. Professionally produced and edited videos of the Islamic State's actions have proved enormously successful, with some being viewed millions of times.

The Islamists have also been successful in using the open nature of social media, including Twitter and Facebook, to spread their message far and wide. Despite significant efforts to shut down user accounts that glorify violence or link to violent imagery, it has largely proved ineffective.

Counter efforts

In Iraq itself, the militia fighting the Islamic State on the ground has also started creating their own videos and propaganda, epitomized in the cult of celebrity being built around "Iraq's Rambo" Abu Azrael, captured in a recent film by France24.

In response to the recent attacks in Paris, the call to counter what is a seductive message to some has become much louder.

Hacking collective Anonymous recently highlighted the risks of such an approach, however, when its efforts to list Twitter accounts used by the Islamic State proved to be more damaging than useful. It was forced to admit that many of the accounts it flagged up had simply mentioned ISIL/ISIS, or contained Arabic. Twitter itself called the list worthless and journalists noted that the list included such people as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the BBC.

The Pentagon has, of course, a long history of producing propaganda, although its effectiveness is debatable. Perhaps that's why the act includes a line about requiring "a process for measuring the performance and effectiveness of the demonstrations."

Hopefully the DoD has become a little more savvy about how things work in 2015, especially considering that its efforts two years ago to explain why the NSA's mass surveillance program was actually a good thing and "get the story straight about the National Security Agency's most criticized foreign intelligence and cybersecurity programs" has the rare distinction of being the most down-voted ever on YouTube: over 20,000 down votes compared to just 450 or so up votes.

And as the kids will tell you, down votes are not going to make you a YouTube star. ®