Understanding Online Recruitment Strategies of Terrorist Groups

Well known terrorist groups like IS, use online media strategies as their most important propaganda and recruitment tool. It aims to spread emotionally charged media propaganda that addresses a broad cross-section of ethnic groups, personality types, sectarian affiliations and political motivations. The internet became a very important medium for inter-country and inter-continent recruitment.

The Internet offers a lot of unique advantages over previous publishing mediums like radio and television. practically anyone can create a website publish literature, images, videos, and software with little or no cost. The information published can be completely controlled by the organization and is not dependent on reporters or approval from authorities. More important, though, is the opportunity presented by this type of media is the ability to communicate with the potential recruits directly in one on one mode. These interactions are being done through forums, chat rooms, email, texts. The recruiters can directly connect with various audiences, and those audiences, in turn, can become active participants in an unfolding conversation. A sense of online community can therefore be fostered, which is nearly impossible with more traditional forms of broadcast media like radio and television. these new internet mediums offered a high level of anonymity and seamless relocation of websites, which made the apprehension of these organizations by law enforcement offices became nearly impossible.

Most radical organizations maintain multiple websites and social media profiles to spread the propaganda, the creation online community helps to gather the sympathisers to their cause, the belief of the potential recruits in the propaganda of the organization tend to increase once they see and interact with more people who share the same ideology as the organization. The constant enforcement provided by the people from the online community and chat rooms contributes substantially to the nourishment of radical ideology in the minds of potential recruits. The propaganda which is spread over these mediums is most of the time socially engineered to appeal to the marginalized and vulnerable sections of society.

The younger generation is more affected by the online spread of propaganda and recruitment of these organizations. because a majority of the users who spend most of their time on the internet are minors. they are being exposed to content that is hard to comprehend properly and as they didn’t develop enough maturity to understand the actual reality of it. Because of this, they are falling victim to the strategies of the organizations easily.

With the use of the internet, the recruits are being able to work for an organization without ever physically meeting the recruiter. They are being able to endorse the organization remotely. The barriers of geography and space in connecting people is decreased by the reach and speed of the Internet. This opened up a whole new domain for radical organizations to experiment with. The internet became a mode of radicalization from a method swiftly.

Like any other normal organization, most radical and terrorist outfits also maintain specific people tasked for recruitment. The recruiters use a lot of means other than their organization's propaganda to influence the decision of the recruit to support the organization or not. The radical organizations are using various strategies to recruit, for easier understanding I have divided them into three categories:-

1) Generalised strategies

2) Socially categorised strategies

3) Personalized strategies

Generalised strategies: under this strategy, there is no specific targeted audience by the recruiter, the internet just enhances the reach of the propaganda under this strategy, this strategy is being used for a long time before the invention of the internet. Usually done in the form of printed literature like pamphlets and small books. the recruiters exploit widely held sentiments (religious discrimination, and religious oppression faced by the people in the recruit’s state). This strategy does not include a lot of one-on-one interactions with the recruiter but the increased connectedness with fellow sympathisers on the online platform helps them cultivate a safe presence in the online platform. In these generalized strategies, the amount of work done by the recruiter is very less, and there won't be any changes in the content they use in the offline mode or online mode. This can only affect the people who are attracted towards the organization for its ideology based on the information available freely.

Socially categorised strategies:

There are socially categorised strategies used by terrorist organizations to recruit people by targeting specific social groups. They create special tactics for every suitable group they want to recruit from. for example, the online recruitment of men, women and children for the ISIL was done with offering something the recruits feel like missing from the recruit’s life, they offered to marry unmarried middle-aged men to beautiful young women, they offered to marry middle-aged widows to men who will look after their needs if they come to the ISIL and live there under their regime. In this strategy the recruiter manipulates the content they publish to please certain targeted social groups, this strategy includes very little or no direct interaction with the recruiter.

They have been  using Western tools and techniques and appropriate them for their purposes against their enemies. These organizations are using their resources very efficiently to appeal to the world to come to join them.

Below are some of the most popular tactics they use for socially categorised recruitment.

i) Using video games that use violent graphics, guns and killing in the story and appealing to the young population that what they do is nothing different than what we are doing in video games. For this purpose, they use video games characters to make a video about the activities they indulge in daily basis.

ii) Using art(in the form of drama and music) to spread the propaganda is known in the world throughout history, but with the introduction of the internet, the organizations are being able to adapt to the cultures which are not popular in their localities, by that they are able to improve their reach into youth throughout the world. For example, they are using hip hop, rock, Rap styles of music that were unfamiliar to the organizations before and not popular in the locations of the organization .to reach the audience who are entirely unfamiliar with the works of the organization. These tactics are used to appeal to young people mostly men.

ii) just like most of the advertisements, the terrorist organizations also use handsome and young men to appeal to the people. They are using handsome and muscled men in the videos they circulate online to appeal to the people. The use of handsome men was adopted by the advertisement industry because people find the content more appealing when there is the use of beautiful& physically fit women and handsome muscled men. They also use children in these circulated videos to create a sense of safety in the minds of viewers about the organization. The terrorist also adopted these tactics as the online platforms opened up the domain easy video and imagery sharing.

These strategies are focused on a certain category of people to religious beliefs, or extent of religious beliefs, financial position in society

As some social media platforms are providing good analytics for people who publish content, the organizations are able to get a good understanding of the audience and adopt new features in their strategies to spread their propaganda better. These analytics provide the content creator with the approximate location of the viewers, demographic range, gender, marital status, employment status etc, depending on the type of platform they are using.

Personalised strategies: This strategy requires mandatory one on one interaction between the recruit and recruiter, this type of recruitment got a lot of attention the recruiter will try to get to know the recruit well and work on the specific vulnerabilities identified in the process. They select people who are actively participating in their online community and forums, and target people who are most likely to join the organization. There are multiple angles used by the recruiters. when it comes to personalized strategies.

i) To recruit minor Muslim girls, the recruiters offer the freedom of living on their own with a place where they can practice their religion children, some girls fall victim to these tactics by travelling to the organization's location to live there. (eg:ISIL)

ii) The recruiter will try to develop a romantic connection with the potential recruit. to recruit young, middle-aged women, the recruiter will offer to marry and take care of her if she works for the organization or travel to the organization's established state like ISIL to live there. Women marrying men and travelling to an Islamic state is known to do in cases where there is no internet aspect is involved, but with the internet, the recruiter is being able to use the same strategy with multiple women from different locations at the same time.

iii) To recruit young and middle-aged women or widows, the recruiter try to appeal to their sensitive nature towards children and the wounded. Sending them pictures and videos of children getting orphaned or wounded due to the state's actions, and convince them that there is a way to help them if they want to help them. They use wounded fighters as well for this purpose.

 There have been a lot of cases where the females from 14-40 years age group leaving their own countries to join the groups like ISIS to get married to handsome men, serve the wounded, take care of the children or practice their religion without facing discrimination. There are people, who joined the organizations without fully understanding their ideology or fully agreeing with their practices, but the above-mentioned strategies gave them a push to join the organization.

The influence of these strategies affecting their radicalization might vary, but these strategies are making it easier for the people whose ideologies are more towards radical society. With the introduction of recruitment through the internet, the concept of foreign fighters in radical groups increased drastically. Some new strategies and some old strategies which got enhanced due to internet. The increased prominence of online terrorist recruitment and propaganda strategies has become a major concern for national security services worldwide. Terrorist organisations received an increased opportunity to spread their ideology and to recruit new members, they have seized upon technological advances in Internet media distribution and online anonymity. the strategies have had limited success owing to their inability to cope with the dynamic and resilient nature of online propaganda and difficulties in co-opting an already marginalized Islamic population who maintain a broad distrust of government authority.

Conclusion:

India is also facing challenges from the radical Islam organization in Kashmir trying to recruit people from all over the country to spread and implement their propaganda, and there are cases where men and women left the country to join radical Islamic organizations in foreign countries, and people other states inside the country joining hands with the radical islamist groups in Kashmir. India should keep a close eye on online platforms to deal with the growing online radicalization, this problem is not very severe in India but it is not small enough to ignore either. A practicable solution has been put forward that when used in conjunction with existing government strategies and extending on the existing intelligence-led collection approach, may provide more effective disruption of terrorist radicalisation strategies. This aims at exploiting covertly acquired personal information about a terrorist that can be utilised to discredit their stance on the ideology in the Islamic community, hence, undermining the radicalising message that they disseminate online.

Pic Courtesy- Fabien Maurin at unsplash.com

(The views expressed are those fo the author and do not represent views of CESCUBE.)