The Islamic State’s Media Content: Nature, Types, Formats

Abstract

Recent theoretical developments have revealed that IS’ social media strate-gies and practices of filling the social network content rise deep awareness of social media to become a push-pull factor of the certain groups’ mindset radicalization and the terrorist discourse legitimation. Furthermore, the authors’ focus revolves around the problem that articulates the fact that social media fast spread and its accessibility facilitated IS and other terrorist, extre-mist and radical movements expand their reach to a wide range of audiences around the world. Together, the present findings confirm that the Islamic State militant group’s widespread activity on social media is being powerfully weaponized and, consequently, the IS’ impact throughout the world and its successful self-marketing as a global brand is being witnessed. A further novel finding is that the Islamic State militant group’s use of social media, while presenting radical Muslim voices and exposing the atrocities of the Islamic State, targets the spread of terrorist propaganda, self-promoting, financial funding, recruiting and training TO advocates from around the world. The body of the article goes on to discuss the problem of social media use in cutting-edge technologies and novel ways to advance its full-spectrum propaganda. It is worth emphasizing that tech-savvy IS media content covers a wide range of tools with a predominance of visual forms of communication: making live broadcasts, audio and video recordings of leaders’ speeches, running educational propaganda campaigns and various instructing films, designing virtual games, etc. Noteworthy, the Islamic State group has been using social media to promote their terrorist agenda and attract a wide audience, mainly young ardent followers. The research results cast a new light on the embracement of the IS skyrocketing technological advancement in both online and social media to develop their sophisticated media strategy has led to informational and technological outreach and evolution of IS itself. In short with concluding remarks, it has been reported that the unprecedented use of social media (innovative use of advanced and easily accessed technologies, their own production quality media content, wide use of online platforms, a number of social networks and messengers, etc.), until its recent demise (in 2015 and 2017), has made Islamic State militant group at the forefront of technological advancement among contemporary terrorist groups. The crux of the problem is its media content, its nature, types and formats remain one of the most effective and efficient weapons for IS. The Terrorist Organization has developed an innovative digital communication strategy (with its hierarchy elements), which enhanced its goals-achieving in terms of radicalization, violence and the Caliphate establishment.