How ISIS is has used newer technology to spread their organizations hatred through the world.

Many of you probably remember the 2015 attacks in San Bernardino that Killed 14 and wounded 24 or the Paris Attack last November that killed a devastating 130 people and injured at least 368 others. The attackers had many Extremist Islamic ties and somehow slipped under the radar unnoticed. These are just two examples of attacks in the last few years of ISIS recruited terrorist. Controversies and issues I want to discuss are number one how they are even allowed t post stuff on social media because they are trying to create harm to people and we need to monitor social media sites 24/7 to insure no threats are made or people are trying to incite violence. I personally believe this topic is very important to research for many reasons. One of those reasons is that there has been an increased number of attacks by isis all over the world and I want to find out how the internet has aided in that. They are also using it to get people to join them and I want to know if they target certain groups other then muslims and how the internet could have helped them.

How ISIS is has used newer technology to spread their organizations hatred through the world. My Tentative Thesis statement is that since technology has gotten better and more efficient the Terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS have changed their way of recruiting people from strictly videos to post on all sorts of social media sites.

I am very interested in this topic because it is a widely occurring topic in todays society. It seem like overtime we turn around ISIS is in the news for some sort of terrorist act and I want to find out more. I have chosen to pursue this topic because I am very interested in trying to find out more about ISIS and why they and how they recruit sleeper cells and militants. I know a decent amount about ISIS themselves but don’t quite now exactly about how they go about recruiting people. I want to find out how, why and where isis recruits its militants.

4. A research and design plan
I will use mostly Primary and secondary sources. I will also use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc.

I am planning on using mainly Primary and secondary sources to find out how social media has impacted how isis has changed the way they recruit people because of the change in social media.

Sources I plan to use:

1. DelCat Discovery
2. Google Scholar
3. UD Library Database
4. Twitter
5. Facebook
6. YouTube
7. Instagram

Things I plan on looking up:

1. ISIS
2. Terrorist
3. How ISIS recruits
4. ISIS on Twitter/Facebook/etc.
5. ISIS in America
6. Demographic makeup of people in ISIS

My Topic is How ISIS uses the Social Media to promote violence and recruit people to join them and how this has changed over the years along with the changes in Technology.

Questions

Do they prefer one site of social Media more than another?

What groups do they try and recruit? -What Country -What race -What religion – What Gender

Why do they use Social media that is more up to date rather than Videos like Al Queda did?

How has the change in technology allowed this to occur?

My goal is to find out how new technology is changing the way terrorist groups work and how they recruit their members. This really popped out at me because back when I was younger when Al Queda was the main threat with Osama Bin Laden I don’t remember them being able to spread violence thru-out our country this easily which means something had to of changed and I am almost positive new technology had something to do with it.

Moosa is mistaken for saying the comment section should be handled with care or removed completely because he overlooks the fact most of the comment sections are used for good and are a way for people to communicate, receive feedback, and many more useful things.

The first quote from moosa’s paper is; “We understand that someone who’s already feeling vulnerable is unlikely to want to share their experiences in a space where they’ll have to constantly defend their actions, so we give them the promise of a friendly, clean comments section” My argument is you can’t hold people from expressing their views against what the person is saying in the post as long as it isn’t derogatory or threatening. Also if the person didn’t want a response then he or she should not have posted it online where it can be criticized.

Another quote from Moosa’s Article is; “Don’t feed the trolls’ frames conversations about aggressive online behaviours solely in terms of the aggressor. Even if a person avoids feeding the trolls (and/or the person accused of trolling), he or she is still playing into the aggressor’s hands.” I totally disagree with this because they will stop “trolling” you if you keep ignoring them because there goal is to get you upset and get and arousal out of you but if you keep ignoring them it takes the fun out of it for them and eventually they will stop.(DON’T EVEN LOOK AT THEIR COMMENTS).

Moosa’s last but not least quote he used is; “Unmoderated comments will never work. There are too many cranks, crackpots, bigots and nasty people with nothing but time on their hands. And no intelligent, thoughtful person will take the time to jump into a comment thread that’s a cesspool, so bad comments inevitably drive out good ones.” I definitely think the polar opposite of this quote because I believe those cranks,crackpots and etc. she is talking about are just a small percentage of the comment sections and I totally believe the good outweighs the bad.

After continuing to read multiple comment sections on various sites about a wide range of topics I still disagree with Tauriq Moosa because in almost every comment section I found the majority of the comments were good and led to a good subject to talk about or when it was a sports topic most of the time it lead to a good sports debate.

I am a huge Tiger Woods fan and as many of you know he has not won a major in about 8 years and has multiple injuries so I decided to look up Tiger Woods comeback and I found an article on SB Nation from one of Tigers good friends Notah Begay. He wrote about how this would more than likely be tigers last comeback and if it failed he would likely hang it up and retire. While I was expecting this to be one of the times where the comments were more demeaning and derogatory towards Tiger, I was pleasantly surprised. Many comments were enthusiastic and said If there is one player that could do it it would be tiger and people were actually getting excited about his October 6th return just talking about him which I thought was pretty cool.

Then I decided to look up the new iPhone 7 and iPhone 7Plus and found an article on Fox titled “Samsung’s Galaxy Note7 woes perfectly timed for Apple on iPhone 7 debut”. I was an article about how samsung phones that have been catching fire and exploding are making people want to switch to Apple just in time for the new release. The comment section was once again a positive sight and I found people talking about which phones they preferred and there were even very humorous comments like; “Samsung is the ultimate phone for the survivalist. You can start a fire anywhere without matches.” But 99 percent of the comment that I saw were again positive and had no disrespect towards people in them.

My final topic I looked up was the Voice season 11 which starts tonight and I found an article on The Huffington Post titled, “‘The Voice’ Judges Kick Off Season 11 With Powerhouse Performance Of ‘Dream On’”. The article was about the show and a sneak peek preview of what the show had in store and about the new judges Miley Cyrus and Alicia Keys. Most of the comments in the comment section were about why or why not certain people were going to watch the show and most people just stated facts in an mature manner about their opinion. This was on of those times where there was a serious debate but nothing out of hand and for sure nothing deserving of being taking off of the site.

In Tauriq Moosa’s article ” Comment Sections are Poison: handle with care or remove them”, she talks about how the comment sections on the internet has become a place where people leave hateful comments and It has become very bad no matter what the topic seems to be. She also says in the first part of her essay that “Comments are often regarded as a right but they can do more harm than good. In the absence of strict moderation, we’d be much better off without them”.

Although I can agree a few of the authors points in this writing I mainly disagree because I believe we need the comment section. Does the comment section do a lot of negative things….. yes but that is only for the people who use it for negative reasons. The comment section is also use for a lot of good because i personally know my aunt that lives in Arizona always comments on my moms Facebook and that is one way they stay in touch. I think that giving the author of the post the power to approve or disapprove the comments before they are posted would be a great idea or they could have a settings button where they could decline the filter and everyone could post without approval.

In both the “Beware Online ‘Filter Bubbles” video and the Political Polarization & Media Habits reading they both say how depending on where we stand politically certain things are filtered from us. I would totally agree with them because I personally know people on both sides of the spectrums, One is a hard core conservative and only watches Fox news and the other is a die hard Liberal and watches MSNBC and CNN. I know that this occurs 100 percent because me, myself am a little guilty of it as well because even though i am just a little liberal I still find myself refusing to watch fox news because i find them obnoxious where now i wonder if it is that i just don’t want to here what they are saying.While yes the liberal gets a little more broader perspective the Conservative only hears what fellow liberal fox reporters want him to hear. If we could somehow break this cycle to where they didn’t hear just what they wanted to hear but where they heard both sides i believe people would be able to talk about their problem easier with people from the other side of the aisle.

The article “Yes All Women” by Sasha Weiss is about how women constantly get discriminated against or treated unfairly in so many ways. The author brings to light many examples of how women are treated unfairly including her own personal experience of her and her friend in the subway where a man made inappropriate gestures by touching himself in front of them. She also talks about Elliot Rodger a man who killed 6 people in a massacre before taking his own life. The significance of him for this article however is what he did before that. In the weeks before his death he posted multiple videos proclaiming his hatred for women and how he wished they would be put in concentration camps and would be ridded from this world.  I definitely think the #YesAllWomen movement is a good thing because it allows women to write about how they feel on social media and other places as well which can help us men understand (the majority that are the good guys) what they are going thru and what we can do to help. Almost every time a women  brings up” Women’s Rights” in a conversation people infer that the women are saying they are better then men when that is not at all the case. Rather they are just expressing how they want to be treated fairly and respectfully.

In The Article “How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media To Fight Power”. Bijan Stephen Talks about how  The spread of news has changed from the Civil rights movements in the 60’s to Now and how Social media has impacted it. For example if someone wanted to report something back then, they had to call multiple different numbers just to get to talk to the person they wanted to report the story too. Where today people just post videos of ” Police Brutality” to the internet and comment on events 24-7. He also says that people can easily plan a protest or demonstration at any point or time in todays society. For example you can do it in multiple different ways whether it be via Twitter, Phone etc. But back in the day it took a lot of time and effort to organize large gatherings back in the day.

Bijan Stephen talks a lot about how people view the Black Lives Matter movement so differently then one another. My opinion on the movement is that they need to stop saying Black Lives Matter but rather they should instead say All lives matter.  Yes are there some bad cops out there….. Absolutely but that is a very small number, I know so many cops that go out day in and day out to keep our community safe and feel like they are becoming the bad guys when really they signed up and try everyday to make a positive change. My thing is is that both sides have made mistakes but we have to learn to get along. We need to come together as a community and as a country and stop thinking we’re different then each other because As Garth Brooks once said in his song “we shall be free”: “When there’s only one race and thats mankind ” (which to me means we are no different then on another we are not Black or White we are humans and we are Americans. I’ll leave you with this; 15 years ago today on 9/11/01 after the brutal and senseless terrorist attacks on our country we came together as a country and we were there for each other, we weren’t any race on that day we were all Americans and I hope it doesn’t take another event like that for us to come together again.

Roxane Gay claims that,…”but for the most part, social media was used to accomplish some good”. I would definitely say for the most part that would be a true statement. For the most part social media is used by people to stay up to date and in touch with not just people but world wide events. I know that I personally use social media to check important events that occur daily and to stay up to date with what my friends are up to, especially the ones that I no longer go to school with. Yes, I realize that here are cases where people use social media for cruel and derogatory purposes like ISIS trying to gain supporters or incite violence; or people trying to discriminate or bully others but for the most part I believe most peoples intentions are good.