Down 70-80 Percent: ISIS Social Media Campaign Collapses Under Military Assault

Helle C. Dale

Security, Middle East

Military advances against Islamic State, or ISIS, held territory in Iraq and Syria have produced a welcome byproduct. 

Military advances against Islamic State, or ISIS, held territory in Iraq and Syria have produced a welcome byproduct: a marked decline by 70-80 percent in the output of social media propaganda by the terror group.

ISIS fighters were recently chased out of the Syrian village of Daqib by Syrian rebel forces without offering much resistance (despite Daqib’s apocalyptic symbolic significance in ISIS lore), and the battle of Mosul has begun as Kurdish, Iraqi, and U.S. forces tighten the noose around ISIS’s largest stronghold.

A new report by West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center, “Communication’s Breakdown: Unraveling the Islamic State’s Media Efforts,” describes in detail the impact of military action on ISIS’s capacity to wage ideological warfare. Promising the coming of the Caliphate and portraying the Islamic State as utopian reality about to happen has become all but impossible.

Not only that, but continued bombardment has destroyed much physical infrastructure, film studios, computers, and buildings housing the ISIS internet operation. The death of chief propagandists has equally affected ISIS efforts to draw recruits.

Over the past year, as the military strategy of combatting ISIS has intensified, the number of foreign fighters flowing into Syria and Iraq from abroad has dropped from some 1,500 a month to 200. At its most prolific, August 2015, ISIS released more than 700 items in one month from official outlets. This August, after a year of airstrikes and other attacks, that number had dropped to less than 200 items.

The decline in ISIS social media activity has also been noticed at the U.S. Department of State, which takes the U.S. government’s lead in counter messaging. This week, Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Rick Stengel told The Chicago Maroon–the student newspaper of the University of Chicago–that he ascribed the drop in ISIS propaganda and recruitment to the success of a new public diplomacy strategy at the State Department, though without any actual evidence to support it.