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Another deadly 21st-Century innovation: Pledging allegiance to ISIS on Facebook

We need to transform social media from a terrorist megaphone and communications network into a tool that can be used by socially responsible individuals and nongovernmental organizations as well as law enforcement to combat the global epidemic of jihadi violence.
[additional-authors]
December 9, 2015

We need to transform social media from a terrorist megaphone and communications network into a tool that can be used by socially responsible individuals and nongovernmental organizations as well as law enforcement to combat the global epidemic of jihadi violence. 

We now know from the FBI that Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, formed the Bonnie-and-Clyde jihadi team that killed 14 and wounded 21 people in the San Bernardino terror attack, pledged allegiance to ISIS on her Facebook page (using an alias) just moments before the couple started shooting up the holiday party at a county center for the developmentally disabled. 

Facebook says it quickly took down Malik’s alias profile because it violated the company’s “terms of service.” The French prime minister and European Commission officials have met with all the social-media giants and other companies to demand faster action against “online terrorism incitement and hate speech.”


Facebook says it quickly took down Malik’s alias profile because it violated the company’s “terms of service.”

The Internet has made YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as American as apple pie, while terrorist recruiters and enablers use social media every day to cook up murderous plots such as the one in San Bernardino, often carried out by “self-radicalized” Internet junkies. 

There were more than 50,000 tweets in the immediate aftermath of the Paris attacks celebrating the mass killings. Now, after San Bernardino, this social-media marketing strategy is already being repeated by sophisticated jihadi networks, lauding the new attack in an attempt to attract more young recruits for the global food chain of terrorism.

Here’s the broader role of social media in the San Bernardino terror spree:

Farook, a county environmental health inspector, visited global jihadi websites featuring Al-Shabaab in Somalia and the al-Nusra Front in Syria. This was in addition to the couple’s use of Facebook, and Farook’s telephonic contacts with ISIS supporters, some investigated by the FBI, in Los Angeles.

Another social-media link that is coming to light is with Muhammed Hassan, a jihad-preaching imam and ISIS recruiter formerly based in Minneapolis but now in Somalia. He helped incite last May’s attack on the Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas. Hassan’s role may parallel that of the late American-born and Yemen-based propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, who wrote the script for Maj. Nidal Hasan’s terrorist killing of 13 military and nonmilitary personnel at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.

The reported 12 pipe bombs in the couple’s garage are close facsimiles of the bombs blueprinted “how to” fashion on al-Qaida sites and by ISIS on sites such as the magazine Dabiq. The first “How to Make a Bomb in Your Mother’s Kitchen” recipes were published in a Palestinian-oriented issue of one of these magazines. We now know, from the mouth of Farook’s father, that he threatened to kill Jews and was obsessed with Israel. 

At this point, we can only guess at what methods San Bernardino’s jihadi Bonnie and Clyde employed via the Internet and social media to acquire inspiration and instructions, and also perhaps to raise money from overseas sources. The FBI is no doubt trying to reconstruct the computer hard drives they destroyed before the attack as well as to penetrate any off-the-shelf encryption apps and other Internet technologies employed to evade surveillance while communicating with co-conspirators.  

Tracking domestic and foreign Internet hate and recruitment sites for more than 20 years, the Simon Wiesenthal Center Digital Hate and Terrorism Project is at the cutting edge to turn around social-media culture from an enabler to an inhibitor of violent hate and a promoter of tolerance. The positive potential of social media was highlighted in 2009, when young Iranians used Twitter as well as Facebook to promote their democratic revolution that came 20 years after Tiananmen Square. Unfortunately, neither President Barack Obama’s administration nor Silicon Valley acted decisively to support the protesters.


Harold Brackman is a historian and is a consultant to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

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