World Wide Warriors – How Jihadis Operate Online pdf

How Jihadis Operate Online

World Wide Warriors

How Jihadis Operate Online – Rüdiger Lohlker

HOW JIHADIS OPERATE ONLINE

The purpose of this chapter was to explain how jihadi movements try to balance their dual interest of maintaining a presence on the Internet and OSNs while at the same time remaining anonymous when operating online. The preceding discussion contributes to our understanding of jihadists’ media use by adding an in-depth analysis of the changes in and the current state of the inner-jihadist debate as well as the steps taken to improve their privacy skills and mitigate the risk of being online.

Building upon previous research on jihadists media use, it is hasbeen shown how, from the early 1990s, jihadi groups shifted their strategic focus to the online sphere and became dependent on new communication technologies for strategic and organizational purposes.

Their dependency on these new online communication technologies have pushed them to find new and innovative methods, to learn about the latest technological trends, and finally adapt to the constantly changing political, social, and media environments.

However, the increase in jihadists’ use of new online communication is essentially a double-edged sword, as it provides their adversaries with a significant amount of sensitive data. Jihadi groups have become increasingly aware of these new threats online and are taking the issue of operational security very seriously.

To be one step ahead of intelligence agencies, they try to stay up-to-date about the latest trends and employ a variety of different measures to conceal their online activities.

At the same time, jihadists fear that relying on privacy-enhancing tools may end up hurting their overall media strategy, as withdrawing to safe and encrypted platforms often goes along with a limited audience reach.

To maintain an online presence on OSNs, jihadists have urged their supporters to return to the biggest ones –Twitter and Facebook– and have used several technologies to (re)create accounts that had been taken down.