Please find below the opening grafs of my latest story for the Washington
Times, about the use of Twitter by Taliban and al-Qaeda.
It appeared on A1 of today's paper, and you may link to the whole story on
the Web here:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/28/terrorists-discover-uses-for-twitter/
You can find a complete archive of all my articles on my staff page, here:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/shaun-waterman/
As ever, feedback is more than welcome and if you wish to stop receiving
these occasional alerts, just let me know by reply e-mail.
Sincerely
Shaun Waterman
Reporter
The Washington Times
Terrorists discover uses for Twitter
By Shaun Waterman - The Washington Times
Banned from Facebook and censored on YouTube, al Qaeda and Taliban jihadists
are turning to Twitter to spread their propaganda in a new social media front
in the terrorists’ war against America.
Extremist groups long have used the Internet to distribute videos, audio
recordings and other messages. But this is the first time they have tried to
establish a presence on the microblogging site Twitter, which has proved a
valuable organizing tool to the young activists behind the revolutions in the
Arab world.
“Up until now, we haven’t seen the [extremist] groups themselves active in
this space,” said William McCants, an analyst with the Center for Naval
Analyses and founder of the blog Jihadica.com, which reports on extremist
messaging.
“The question is: Is this the start of a trend, or is it an anomaly?” he
said, adding that individual supporters of extremist groups appear to be
using Twitter.
The Twitter feed @alemarahweb posts links to the official website of the
Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban calls itself. The feed, in
Pashto - the language spoken in the Taliban heartland of southern Afghanistan
and the tribal regions of Pakistan - has been active since December and has
posted more than 670 tweets, as the 140-character Twitter messages are
called.
Another Twitter account, @al_nukhba, was set up last month. It posts links to
an Arabic-language website called Nukhba al-Ilam al-Jihadi, or Jihadi Media
Elite (JME). The website features Arabic transcripts of audio and video
messages from al Qaeda and its affiliates in Yemen, North Africa and Iraq,
said Christopher Anzalone, who identified the feeds.
Mr. Anzalone, a doctorate student at the Institute of Islamic Studies at
McGill University in Montreal who studies Muslim political movements’ use of
multimedia, said the phenomenon is new.
“There are a small number of [extremist media] outfits with Twitter
accounts,” he said, calling the groups’ use of the service “very nascent.”
Whether the groups continue to tweet, in part, “depends on how Twitter
responds,” he said.
“It’s hard to tell who exactly is posting [the tweets],” Mr. Anzalone said,
noting that the Taliban feeds only posted links to the group’s official site.
To read the rest, click here:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/28/terrorists-discover-uses-for-twitter/
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