Much has been made of the role of twitter in social revolutions around the world in the past few years. Many watched the Arab Spring as it unfolded one tweet at a time. Back in July, Small Wars Journal posited that “the future of revolutionary movements in globalized societies will involve social media is assured, but the degree to which it will is yet to be determined”.
What happens when the same social networks are used by extremist groups? Back in September, the al Qaeda affiliate al-Shabab used Twitter to livetweet the attack on Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Writing for Foreign Policy, J.M. Berger is critical of the network's response.
Twitter’s policies on violent and terrorist content are light-years behind those of industry peers Facebook and YouTube. While those social media services are far from perfect, both offer reporting tools that make it easy to flag terrorist content, and both take a proactive approach to the problem, aggressively seeking out offenders and crafting terms of service that provide significant latitude for dealing with terrorist abuses.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies looks at Twitter as a tool or a threat in a panel discussion. Should governments be exploiting and monitoring social media? Is it OK that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, is on Twitter, when the platform is banned in his country? And should Twitter just be banning terrorist groups?
