Media arsenal of ISIS Part III - pictorial and phonic violence
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Fourth Monitoring Report
Iraqi media house is trying during this observatory to display an initial perceptions about the media machinery of ISIS, through a rough census of its various platforms and windows, as well as follow up its media contents and their presentation mechanisms and promotion, also recognition of the preventive arrangements of the extremist organization to evade censorship and closure procedures which carried out by Worldwide Web companies.
This observatory includes monitoring the informational language used in such platforms, methods of design, forms of presentation, and the significations, also it follows up the platforms of visual materials which considered as the fundamental pillars in media products of the organization.
The observatory includes also the websites that do not belong to ISIS but deal in different ways with its activities on the ground, as well as the extent of their interaction and communication with the 'Jihadi' audience as an important modern mechanism tool to serve ISIS popular expansion.
This part will be devoted for a statistical study of ISIS's activities in video clips' dissemination and promotion outlets.
ISIS organization deliberately publish video clips in various media websites, to clarify its ideology, and spread speeches and scenes of its battles.
Those videos often contain scenes of murder, violence and speeches that call for "jihad" against anyone who opposes ISIS ideology and actions, as well as informational clips which show the way ISIS controls areas it seized.
The organization harnesses social networks, blogs, and websites to broadcast those videos, which are characterized by professional directing methods, and significant technical accuracy, while some of them are simple and technically poor.
Video publishing sites
The videos are published in most famous sites, such as "YouTube, Vimeo, and SendVid'', and the organization tries to upload them multi times by various accounts.
YouTube
The widespread ''YouTube'' admins remove videos containing scenes of executions or killing, as a result of viewers reporting notifications, and often it takes time before the removal achieved, that provides the opportunity of watching and spreading the videos through internet network, while YouTube admins keep the enticing videos that represent aspects of missionary belong to the organization;
The organization uploads the same videos in other sites, which are not very familiar in the Middle East regions, including Iraq, such as "Vimeo" and "Sendvid''.
ISIS' elements or followers publish a single video in successive various times, as they aim to avoid deletion, and make those videos available for those who are looking for them; such videos are re-deployed by multiple accounts run by people from within the organization or sympathizers, and those accounts are deleted by YouTube management team, according to viewers reports too; Therefore the organization compensates the cancelled accounts by new ones constantly, those accounts hold false names or kinetic names of ISIS elements.
Some websites affiliate to ISIS suffer of technical problems, especially when dealing with Arabic language, like the website 'Search' problem.
Some of those published videos include newsletters that broadcasted in "Al Bayan" Radio of city of Mosul in northern Iraq, which is controlled by ISIS since June, last year, the newsletters presents battles news, announces the names of suicide bombers who carry out operations against security forces.
Published videos are not limited to Arabic, but also by other languages such as English and Kurdish.
ISIS organization harnesses the social networks to disseminate and promote their videos, by attaching their links with tweets, and usually several links for the same video uploaded in more than one location or for more than one account in the site, and ISIS elements retweet the original tweets that contain the videos repeatedly in order to ensure the dissemination to largest number of viewers.
Tweeters are not necessarily in contact with each other’s, some of them just sympathetic to the organization and not members in it.
And Twitter admins delete the accounts that belong to ISIS elements constantly.
ISIS elements use Facebook to publish videos on ISIS backer pages.
Publishing or sharing those videos is not limited to ISIS elements or followers, but the opponents of the organization participate in spreading ISIS propaganda by sharing such videos to create a counter opinion against the organization, but their actions actually contributes into an indirect promotion for the ideology of the radical organization.
Facebook administration delete such pages as well as videos contain violence scenes when they are reported by users, and ISIS elements rarely reopen the deleted pages , as they follow another way to spread the videos, either by ISIS supportive pages or anti-ISIS publishers as mentioned before.
Blogs
ISIS elements use blogging service for publishing its ideology and Videos, they take the advantage of that free service for their propaganda purposes, they direct and edit the design of their pages to be appropriate for their targets, while these pages allow them to deploy video clips and photos in more flexible way and effective like adding several passages with multiple images per one page, as well as logos and backgrounds;
Blogs major advantages lay in being found easily through internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo;
Also, most of blogs are free such as blogger or WordPress do not require more than registration, while some of them do not even need registration as materials can be published directly, like nasher.me and justpaste.it.
Video clips upload
ISIS exploits global download websites which are available to all computers and uploads its clips to be transferred to audience devices, those websites such as ''4shared, Adf.ly'', used by ISIS to upload the propaganda videos in multi forms or extensions, also with many accuracy and clarity degrees in order to fit all users' devices and all internet speed services.
Experts Notes
'' ISIS elements can easily establish accounts in social network sites and create and design pages on the Internet, also can buy their own domain'', says an IT expert in Iraqi media house.
He adds that ISIS organization can buy online their own server package, by contacting companies in Europe or USA, and then upload files and design their own websites;
He explained, ‘’the reason for all this lays in the lack of laws and regulations that govern the mechanism of supply companies’’.
''The GoDaddy Company is an example (https://www.godaddy.com), it has more than 16 million servers, which are very difficult to monitor'', the expert says.
He pointed out that ‘’such companies rely on receiving complaints by observers to monitor or close those services, but 90 percent of the companies refuse complaints under the pretext of maintaining personal freedom’’.
Translated By: Halla AlSalam
