They Planted Porn in ISIS Propaganda, Just for Starters, Then Sowed Chaos and Confusion in the 'Cali
Source: MSN
BEIRUT—Six young Iraqis are taking a strategy straight out of the Kremlin’s mischievous playbook, but with no thanks to Moscow. They’re using hacked accounts to attack the so-called Islamic State and fake news to disrupt its “virtual caliphate.”
Given the dangers they face, the six people who make up the little group calling itself, with conscious irony, “Daeshgram”—its name melding the Arabic acronym for ISIS and Instagram—are forced to live something resembling double lives. Four of them work professionally in information technology and cybersecurity, one is an engineer, the other a student—all of them live in Iraq. Their families and friends know nothing of their efforts to push back against ISIS.
If the streets of Mosul were Iraq’s physical frontline against the jihadists, then surely it is the social media channels and encrypted messaging applications that serve as the front line against the cyber caliphate, and these young geeks are deep in the trenches.
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Nada concludes: “Journalists and analysts are not our target audience. Daesh supporters themselves, especially the Arabic speaking ones, are our target. Our main objective was to create confusion and discord, and we were able to do that. What Western analysts think is not really relevant to our work.
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/they-planted-porn-in-isis-propaganda-just-for-starters-then-sowed-chaos-and-confusion-in-the-caliphate/ar-BBFpDrb?li=BBnbcA1
Interesting story about Iraqis creating fake news to fight ISIS.
The problem in the U.S. was not so much that Russia created fake news, but it was the willingness and enthusiasm of the Trump campaign and right media to embrace and spread such lies. The Republican party planted the seeds that lead to the Trump presidency.
Likewise, there are those on the left such as Jill Stein who would happily embrace Russian propaganda in order to try to undermine the Democratic party in the hopes of gaining liberal supporters.
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