Many Islamists online made fun of the State Department’s efforts to counter online radical recruiting.
In a breezy speech celebrating his wife’s nomination, former President Bill Clinton touted Hillary Clinton’s success fighting extremist propaganda when she presided over the State Department. “She launched a team — this is really important today — she launched a team to fight back against terrorists online and built a new global counterterrorism effort,” Clinton said. “We’ve got to win this battle in the mind field.”
It was essentially a throwaway line about a vital topic. It was also not entirely true—or at least failed to depict the bumbling effort behind the State Department’s campaign to counter online radicalization and the sharing of extremist material. For at least five years, under a program begun during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary, the State Department has been working to disrupt extremist messaging from the Islamic State and other terrorist groups. The government has spent millions of dollars but has little to show for its efforts.
Indeed, a government report last year by a panel of tech industry and advertising figures questioned whether the U.S. government should be engaging in any kind of “overt messaging” at all against the Islamic State. Although the panel’s report wasn’t publicly released — and its members’ credentials criticized, since none of them spoke Arabic, Urdu, Somali, or the other languages in which the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) publishes — that criticism seems to have accelerated a shift to outsourcing the anti-Islamic State propaganda effort away from State and to allied organizations, especially those who may be seen as having credibility in Muslim communities.
Further evidence of the Clinton program’s inadequacies came last March, when a new executive order rebooted the CSCC as the Global Engagement Center. Headed by former Navy SEAL Cmdr. Michael Lumpkin, the new GEC is armed with a $15 million budget (three times the CSCC’s original budget). Lumpkin told The Hill that he plans to scale the GEC up to 150 people — writers, graphics designers, data analysts, programmers, diplomats, intelligence consultants, and so on. Sounding a bit like a Silicon Valley executive, Lumpkin has promised to “build an innovative, agile organization” while also making the GEC the heir to previous wartime propaganda organizations, from the WWI-era Committee on Public Information to the Cold War-driven United States Information Agency.
Established by a presidential executive order in 2011, the CSCC was supposed to be the hub of the government’s counter-Islamic State information operations. The CSCC created social media accounts in several languages on a number of popular platforms, though its most visible was an English-language Twitter account called “Think Again Turn Away.” It was through this Twitter handle that the CSCC eventually became known as much for its crude graphic design and awkward debates with jihadist sympathizers as for any successes in the realm of countering violent extremism (CVE). (I was one of a number of journalists who took a skeptical look at the State Department’s efforts.)
There were few available metrics or public data for tracking State’s CVE campaign, and the target audience — extremist sympathizers around the world — seemed unimpressed. If anything the State effort only appeared to raise the profile of the Islamists it was targeting. “One mention and you get more followers,” a Middle Eastern Twitter user who brawled with the CSCC told a journalist. “Who doesn’t like free marketing?”
When it was founded, the Islamic State — or Daesh, as State Department officials sometimes refer to it, using a derogatory Arabic acronym — wasn’t a glimmer in the CSCC’s eye. In an early speech, State’s Alberto Fernandez said that the CSCC’s plan was based on “poking holes in the daily narrative of al Qaeda and its friends and its allies.” Quoting Joan Didion, Fernandez extolled the power of stories to change how we see ourselves and the world; it was literary theory adapted to the realm of soft power.
With bipartisan support, the CSCC limped forward, growing its staff and its $5 million budget, cycling through various directors. Gradually, the organization refined its messaging, hired more contractors to publish in more languages, and developed partnerships with foreign governments and NGOs
Last summer, after Hillary Clinton had left office, the Obama administration and the United Arab Emirates also created the Sawab Center, a counter-Islamic State propaganda shop based in the UAE. The Sawab Center, in turn, is affiliated with the Global Coalition, a coterie of 67 countries “united in degrading and defeating Daesh.” The Global Coalition also lays claim to a Counter-Messaging Working Group — a joint UAE/UK/US operation — and receives help from the Coalition Communications Cell, which works out of the UK’s Foreign Office.
And what of the successor organization, the Global Engagement Center? According to Executive Order 13721, which President Obama signed on March 14, 2016, the GEC will “lead the coordination, integration, and synchronization of government-wide communications activities” against the Islamic State, meaning that the GEC’s portfolio could easily expand as it exerts its authority to manage the government’s counter-IS propaganda operations. And that’s assuming that other extremist groups don’t assume center stage as the main enemy, just as ISIS supplanted al Qaeda. The information war against the Islamic State, in other words, may end up being as long, murky, and unresolvable as the kinetic battles of the global war on terror. The appointment of Lumpkin, who previously served as assistant secretary of Defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, indicates that the GEC plans to an engage in a protracted, shadowy conflict in cyberspace.
But it’s still unclear whether all of this frenzied meme-sharing and coalition-building can make a meaningful difference in the fight against the Islamic State. One question consistently rears its head: what does victory look like? The Obama administration has recently touted a 45 percent decline in the Islamic State’s usage of Twitter, but much of that can be attributed to more determined moderation efforts by Twitter itself (albeit at the urging of the State Department and many others). While Twitter is no longer the font of gruesome jihadist videos it once was — at least 125,000 Islamic State supporters have been suspended from the service in the last year — terrorist groups still enjoy access to Telegram, Kik, WhatsApp, Vkontakte, and various other private, encrypted forums and chat apps, some of their own making.
Should the U.S. government ultimately feel entitled to declare victory in this particular low-intensity conflict, some of the credit earned may fall on the shoulders of Hillary Clinton, as her husband declared last night. But judging from recent history, that day may be many years away.
Filed under: Information operations Tagged: CounterPropaganda, Daesh, ISIS, Islamic state, propaganda, United States Department of State
