The year is 2015. Following the November Paris Attacks — in which 129 individuals were killed by ISIS, and even more were left wounded — online “hacktivist” group Anonymous publicly declared war on the Islamic State’s online operations, serving as the catalyst for swift, severe retaliation, and eventually, a full-blown cyberwar between the two parties. Anonymous and ISIS’s 2015 conflict (“OpISIS”) — while widely regarded as the first prominent declaration of cyberwarfare by a non-state actor in the 21st century — is not isolated. Rather, it demonstrates a larger shift in vigilante counterterrorism. Not only are international terrorist groups increasingly pivoting towards social media recruitment to expand their influence in the western world, but the subsequent retaliation is indicative of an entirely new means of warfare: one with the internet and social media at the forefront.
Social media platforms, while often regarded politically as a way candidates running for public office may advertise their policy positions and secure a strong voter base, also have the propensity to become hotbeds for nefarious action. As online political discourse has become more prevalent, so have loosely regulated outlets which allow extremist indoctrination to spread more efficiently. In his book Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate scholar Abdel-Bari Atwan explains that platforms like 4Chan and Twitter have served as “recruiting tool[s] and psychological warfare weapon[s],” and have shapeshifted from conventional communication channels to “advanced media machine[s].”1 Moreover, a 2018 RAND report demonstrates that this is not isolated to the home countries of these groups. Rather, major terrorist groups such as ISIS have been able to mobilize “an estimated 40,000 foreign nationals from 100 countries” to join.
This expansion is achieved through two key steps. First, extremist groups proliferate thousands of shell accounts designed to look like average users — typically in the western world. Second, they couple recruitment posts with unrelated, trending topics and hashtags (for instance, #WorldCup) in order to widen their reach to the median viewer. Yet despite being shrouded in popular trends and hashtags, much of this content is overtly radical, leading one to question: who buys in? While the fundamentally deregulated nature of platforms like 4Chan — and to some extent, X — have allowed for large-level dissemination of propaganda, there is a uniquely psychological aspect which outlines how it has garnered so much success in the first place.
As outlined in Tamar Mitts’s book From Isolation to Radicalization: Anti-Muslim Hostility and Support for ISIS in the West, when analyzing the demographic backgrounds of the nearly 30,000 foreigners who traveled to countries in the Middle East to fight for ISIS, there was little overlap in age group, racial background, and socioeconomic status. Rather, what most had in common was a shared sense of isolation coupled with an extensive amount of time spent online. Abdulla Almutairi’s “Social Media as a Recruitment Tool for ISIS” details that the appeal is typically towards “alienated youth, mostly male, who are searching for a sense of belonging and a true calling, a sense of mission and value for their disaffected lives.”
The benefit that this demographic offers to extremist groups is twofold. First, it is easier to recruit, given that its members spend most of their time on the platforms where this content is rapidly spread. Second, they are more likely to be devoted to the cause to which they are radicalized, and will go to great lengths (from travel to violent action) to engage in the group’s larger ideological goals. While the messaging which appears in most propaganda videos at first focuses on incentives — such as the sense of “community” one can obtain by joining one of these groups. This often serves as not only a pipeline for more violent content, but an eventual impetus towards dangerous action once groupthink causes the collective to become more radical. These actions in recent years have become increasingly deterred by non-state “hacktivist” organizations.
Anonymous was virtually unheard of before the turn of the 21st century, but following the early 2010s, it cemented its legacy as one of the largest international, non-state hacktivist collective organizations. Essentially, Anonymous is synonymous with the internet, and since its founding in 2003, has gained notoriety for interventions ranging from attacks on the Tunisian and Zimbabwean government websites in 2010, to hacking the Federal Reserve three years later. Anonymous’s distinctiveness lies in its autonomous nature, lack of defined ideology, and willingness to take significant risks — such as intercepting the systems of state governments — to achieve their goals.
While Anonymous is arguably the largest and most notorious hacktivist group, more and more have propped up following the 2015 cyberwar, suggesting that we may be entering a new era in counterterrorism specific to digital attacks. At the very least, social media is certainly being used as a tool for states to achieve their own political goals. There is also increasing evidence that non-state actors beyond ISIS also have been employing it in lieu of password-protected forums because “the pool of potential recruits, supporters, or sympathizers that can be reached on social media is vastly larger.” The simultaneous rise of both terrorist digital attacks coupled with hacktivist retaliation is akin to two state governments in perpetual competition with one another — a digital arms race, with social media content and propaganda at the forefront. As a result, one may pose the question as to whether hacktivist groups can be mobilized in collaboration with governments such as the United States to take down targets.
However, this does not come without potential risks. Groups like Anonymous, while possible tools to foster accountability in global cyberspace, lack centralization due to their lack of large-scale or uniform political or ideological commitments. Given that they do not pledge allegiance to any specific party, actor, or government, action may not be realized unless Anonymous feels a strong incentive — something hard to come by if there is little coherence among members and difficulty in mobilizing. But this doesn’t mean that hacktivism as a whole lacks security use, or that states cannot adopt similar measures in their own security operations. If state governments hope to keep pace with both terrorist threats and independent actors operating in cyberspace, they must rapidly advance their digital infrastructure, because if there’s one thing that Anonymous’s 2015 “OpISIS” demonstrates, it is that hacktivism is here to stay.
- Abdel Bari Atwan, Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate (London: Saqi Books, 2015) ↩︎
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: Social Media, Image sourced from Sprout Media Lab | CC License, no changes made