Taliban: Flying Disabled Helicopters and Doing the Social Media Thing
September 7, 2021
Images of disabled US military helicopters stick in my mind. The Taliban claims it is no longer a terrorist group and promises it will keep some of the changes that were implemented in Afghanistan in the last twenty years. Plus, the ruling group knows how to fly and do social media. ABC News explores how the Taliban uses modern technology to its advantage: “How The Taliban Use Social Media To Seek Legitimacy In The West, Sow Chaos At Home.”
The Taliban has one of the more interesting human rights records in the world. Religious fundamentalist groups (of any origin) manifest fascinating behaviors. Take that back, religious fundamentalist groups do change to accommodate anything they can exploit for their advantage, like the Taliban has with social media. The Taliban adopted social media as a propaganda tool in the manner the Nazis turned every faction of society from movies to children’s books into a propaganda piece.
The Taliban controls or influences news pieces about Afghanistan:
“The Taliban now has the ability to communicate directly with the rest of the world, as well as to control the narrative around events as it has been trying to do for years at home and abroad through a barrage of messages on social media. Experts say it effectively did an end around the Afghan government through its unrelenting publicity campaign, capitalizing on disinformation and a lack of media literacy.”
Journalists in Kabul report on Afghanistan’s crisis, but the Taliban says everything is okay on social media. Experts claim that the Taliban has a sophisticated social media strategy to deceive the West and legitimize the new “government” on the world stage. The Taliban is very deceptive and know how to placate westerners, similar to Chinese and North Korean politicians.
Afghanistan has low Internet literacy and most Afghanis are apt to take Taliban propaganda as fact. Meanwhile the Taliban as an active social media presence, especially on Twitter. Twitter does not ban the Taliban, because the US government has not labeled it a terrorist group. Facebook, however, does ban the Taliban.
The Taliban posts more messages in foreign languages, especially English. In fact, they post more on Twitter than many US and European government departments. They also post lies aka disinformation on Twitter. There is widespread demand for Twitter to ban the Taliban accounts, but Twitter responds they are vigilant monitoring them. The Taliban wants to lure the West into a false sense of security and arguably it is what they have done for the past twenty years. Maybe some of the Taliban picked up social media methods from Cambridge Analytica?
Whitney Grace, September 7, 2021
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