ISIS Social Media & the Case of Tumblr – By Linda Dayan (Tel Aviv)

MESOP REPORT : BEE HIVE MEDIA – Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2015

In mid-December, police forces in Bangalore, India identified and apprehended @ShamiWitness, a Twitter user with tens of thousands of followers who used his social media platforms to drum up support for the Islamic State (ISIS).1 This crackdown comes in the wake of increased mainstream international media attention to Twitter and Facebook as tools of ISIS recruitment. For many of the young, mostly European, Muslims who are making the journey to fight and live alongside ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Social Networking Sites (SNS) are often the first stop.2 While Twitter and Facebook (as well as the website ask.fm, where users send others questions to answer) have played a major role in disseminating ISIS propaganda, ISIS accounts are suspended and removed every day.3

Most social networking sites have terms of service that forbid incitement, hate speech, and images of real-life violence and gore, and ISIS members cannot broadcast their message – and seek out possible recruits – without violating these rules. One social media site that seems to be immune to this pattern of registration, termination, and restarting of ISIS accounts is Tumblr.

A “microblogging” platform, Tumblr allows users to maintain blogs in which they can post long- or short-form text, videos, pictures, music, and other media. They can also “reblog,” or share content, from other Tumblr blogs, and send and answer private and public messages. While the Tumblr Community Guidelines also forbid incitement, illegal activity, gore, and hateful speech,4 its staff of 318 oversee more than 200 million blogs with over 98 billion posts.5 If ISIS blogs fall under the radar or are not reported to

the staff as often as others who violate the guidelines, they can remain active for much longer than accounts on Twitter or ask.fm, which boast a more robust staff.

The Tumblr demographic skews young, female, and Anglophone.6 On the website, ISIS members and their supporters tend to fit this profile as well. Many ISIS-aligned blogs are difficult to identify at first, because they often include similar content to blogs run by teenage, female, moderate, observant Muslims – quotes about Jannah (paradise) superimposed over pictures of flowers, relatable quotes and jokes about high school, artfully photographed desserts, verses from the Qur’an. As many Tumblr users have a social justice bent, anti-imperialist or anti-Western content is neither unusual nor indicative of affiliation with actual political parties or groups. It is pictures of mujahids in Syria rather than refugee children, ISIS flags rather than those of their homelands, and quotes extolling the virtues of martyrdom that set bloggers who affiliate themselves with ISIS apart. One Danish blogger, bintkhalil,7 is representative of this archetype; interspersed between edited graphics of flowers, gifs from popular films, and posts expressing solidarity with oppressed peoples around the world are black ISIS flags8 and content from pro-ISIS blogs praising jihadis.9

Bloggers who post content sympathetic to or supportive of ISIS often follow and reblog posts from users who are already living and fighting in ISIS territory. One particularly popular blogger is “Bird of Jannah,” an English-speaking Malaysian woman in her mid-twenties. She has joined ISIS in Tabqah, Syria, and maintains a following on Twitter over 1,500 strong10 despite having had her account terminated multiple times. Her Tumblr blog, “Diary of a Muhajira,” serializes her experiences as a wife in the Islamic State.11 Below homemade graphics featuring quotes about martyrdom,12 jihad, and Jannah, she writes impassioned posts urging readers, particularly women, to join ISIS themselves as fighters and professionals.13 She also writes semi-regular updates about her home life, her husband (an ISIS militant), and friends in ISIS-controlled Syria.14 Significant media attention has been paid to this “love story,”15 a rare report of the mundane lives of those living in ISIS territory from the perspective of one doing so voluntarily, with the threat – or joy, as Bird of Jannah sees it – of looming martyrdom. In addition to giving advice to those asking for it on her blog and posting original content, she has also provided links to contacts who want to help other young Muslims move to ISIS territory.16

The most prolific of these contacts is Paladin of Jihad, a twenty-year-old Maldivian17 blogger whose first post, dated January 31, 2014, proclaims that the goal of his blog is to collect his thoughts, and, “by sharing with you some of these thoughts, I humbly believe that you might derive benefit from them, in shā Allah.”18 Though his #Dustyfeet series of posts began as a call for Muslims to identify and rectify their weaknesses, both in themselves and in their communities, they soon evolved into a call to jihad, citing the Salafi publication “The Tawheed of Action.”19 His posts, bordered by Islamic and Islamist texts, grow increasingly instructional with time: directions on braving the elements, a packing list for the journey to Syria, and even detailed, step-by-step instructions on entering ISIS territory through Turkey, with separate advice for men and women.20 His prose is marked by hashtags and English slang (“I strongly recommend you to bring knives because they’re essential tools here (and because maybe I am a bit of a knife freak, but #AllowIt)”21, and these more informal elements have become more prominent over the last year, giving him an image that endears him to his target audience: young, media-savvy, disillusioned Westerners. Many users who have reblogged content from his and similar blogs have either expressed their support for or intention to join ISIS. One such blogger is Al-Amriki,22 who goes by the nom de guerre of Umm Kirin. A nineteen-year-old conver t to Islam, her page displays an ISIS flag and her ask.fm page reveals that her mother has already confiscated her passport.23

Many Tumblr users who affiliate themselves with ISIS, are, in effect, harmless. They have committed no crimes, they have no plans to join the fighting in Iraq and Syria, and their anonymous online activism does not translate into real-world action, but this makes identifying and apprehending actual ISIS members significantly more difficult. Although some users might post ISIS material for shock value, a small but significant circle of bloggers actively supporting and recruiting for ISIS shows just how difficult it will be for administrators and staff on SNS to destroy the threat they pose. Because of Tumblr’s lax security, long-form text options, and messaging services, more bloggers like Bird of Jannah and Paladin of Jihad can easily disseminate resources on SNS to recruit fighters for ISIS, and more teens like Umm Kirin, who are already susceptible to radicalism, can find and use them.