Rabbi Abraham Cooper: Social media serves as terrorist recruiting tool

Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the terrorists behind the attack on the Inland Regional Center in San Beardino, are a local example of a phenomenon that Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of Los Angeles’ Simon Wiesenthal Center, says has become more and more of a problem with the twin rises of smart phones and social media: People “radicalizing in place” via propaganda put out by ISIS and other terrorist groups, rather than taking direct instruction from an Osama bin Laden-like leader.

“How the hell did teenage girls in London, who were second-generation British citizens, end up with ISIS? The answer is that ISIS deployed a brilliant marketing strategy targeting young girls in that country,” he said. “How important is the accessibility of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook to terrorist groups like ISIS? It’s almost everything. Because it lets them bypass the parents, the clergy, and bypass national borders to get young kids to drink the Kool-Aid.”

ISIS makes no bones about the importance of social media to their effort to tu much of the Muslim world into a so-called caliphate under their rule. On Wednesday, ISIS terrorists threatened the founders of Twitter and Facebook for their efforts to limit ISIS’ use of their networks.

“Facebook is, I would say, a leader in this space. The guys who have been last to advance have been Twitter,” Cooper said. “On average, ISIS was sending out 200,000 tweets a day (as of October).”

On Feb. 5, Twitter aounced that it had suspended more than 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist activities, most of them ISIS-related.

“That would explain the special attention given to them by ISIS,” said Cooper, who met with Twitter officials in the Bay Area last week. “It’s clear to me that they’re also taking additional steps, proactive steps, similar to what Facebook has been doing for a while now.”

Cooper and the center have been studying this phenomenon for a while now: On March 7, the latest edition of the center’s Digital Hate + Terrorism Report will be issued, grading YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other social media on their efforts to combat the terrorist use of their networks.

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