US's Centcom Counters ISIL Propaganda

ISIL’s ‘Bait and Switch’

Officials said one of the main narratives web ops works to amplify involves the stories of ISIL defectors.

“The main thing we see defectors complaining about is that … it was a bait and switch,” one official said. “They were told they would be fighting the Syrian regime or ‘the crusaders,’ and instead they found themselves fighting against other Muslims -- opposition groups. That’s the single most prominent complaint we hear. That’s the most commonly cited reason why they leave [ISIL], because they were lied to about what they would be doing.”

The official said ISIL defectors also “revealed how ISIL had staged a lot of their supposed demonstrations of power -- everything from raids on enemy strongholds to food in the marketplace, and how everything about ISIL’s public persona is being micromanaged by media spinners. Fake propaganda.”

Disrupting ISIL Propaganda

Web ops uses a three-prong approach, an official said: ‘disrupting’ adversary propaganda, exposing adversaries’ hypocrisies and crimes through engagements with at-risk target audiences, and mobilizing the adversaries’ opponents to more effectively combat the adversary online.

Mobilizing adversary opponents occurs, the official explained, “through regular engagement, in-language, with regional target audiences online, using factual information consistent with our approved narratives.”

To locate ISIL adversaries and target audiences, the official said, “We use mostly commercial off-the-shelf regular old [searches] to identify keywords associated with the adversary’s narrative, along with obviously manual analyst target-audience analysis. And for at-risk users it’s a similar process; we identify common terms that are publicly searchable that indicate an individual is sympathetic to the adversary’s narrative.”

An assessments team works to measure the effectiveness of web operations, officials said. One noted, “MISO is a traditional military activity, and if it’s directed at an adversary communications [capability], then simply countering or disrupting adversary communication could in and of itself be a measure of effectiveness.”

(Source: US Dept of Defense)