Social Media and The Media Impact Terrorism

Manuel Coronel

Arizona State University

 When you hear the word terrorism, what comes to your mind? People will say routine,

tragic events, my life, and world news that happens in other countries. Terrorism is a system of

terror and use of violence or threats to intimidate for political purpose. Whenever there is a

worldwide attack in the U.S, it’s brought terrorism to the national wide news and social media.

Terrorist tend to use social media and news to spread fear, to recruit, publicize itself, and to

terrify the civilians. When terrorist attacked New York in 2001 and killed thousands of people,

the main reason was to spread fear to millions of people in the world. Journals and news

companies needs to know when to cover and how to cover terrorist attacks because do you want

the world to keep living in fear? It’s important to know more about how terrorism is using new

ways to spread their fear and conduct studies to prevent terrorist from attacking in the United

States. Not only the experts should know, but the world should know how to deal with terrorist

attacks and stop letting them spread fear to civilians and change political situations. The main

purpose of terrorism using social media and the new media to market themselves.

Terrorist organization has been using social media and the news coverage to help spread

their purpose. social media plays a major role for terrorist organization in this generation because

provides them so many opportunities and spread their main purpose. The benefits with social

media are that terrorist could communicate with other, recruit new members, spread fear, etc. In

the article, The Boston Game and the ISIS Match: Terrorism, Media, and Sport by researcher

Luke Bertram. According to Bertram 2016, the biggest symbol for terrorist is communication

and the main way to achieve their main purpose goal of spreading fear and violence in the world.

Social media is the easiest way to communicate with one another around the world or even in

different states. Communication is the key for terrorist to spread fear through social media cause

in this generation platform. how terrorist recruit new member is viewed from two point by
overcoming of distance and sovereign boundaries according to (Labi, 2016) and it will help

increase to propaganda. When the Boston Marathon bombing and the attacked of Brussels

Airport in Belgium. Once all these attacks happened the world went straight to social media to

tweet about how they felt scared, sad, and some violence response. terrorist group doesn’t want

to target a certain audience but want to spread fear towards different groups and communities

around the world. Terrorist group doesn’t care if they anyone or kill anyone they just don’t want

to be forgotten about and want citizens to be talking about them in anyway.

Terrorist organization has a relationship with the news media by having news channel

spread their actions and talk about what they did on live television. Whenever terrorist group

held someone hostage or did something violent only to spread its propaganda around the world.

Whenever this happens journalism tend to make these stories a bigger deal than it is, and it helps

the terrorism by spreading their main purpose of fear and violence. In the article, The Contested

Ethics of Mainstream Reporting of Terrorism in the Social Media Age it says, “To ensure that it

can be an effective check on powers, the media has various privileges and immunities

conditional on it fearlessly speaking the truth and vigilantly disseminating information of public

interest” (Lim 2016). This doesn’t help anyone because they have the power to talk freely about

terrorist attacks and want people to know what’s happening in the world.

However, this viewpoint may have a point, but the use of terrorist organization using

social media and the new coverage helps counter terrorism to prevent them to spread fear and

market themselves. The news media does tend to have their up downs by spreading terrorist

action, but it doesn’t just help terrorist it helps the citizens around the world with all of this

information about where it took place and who were involved in the action. social media has all

this information about terrorist posting and the counter terrorism could use all of that information
to analysis the date and collection. When people tended to tweet ISIS, Syria, and Islamic State

it’s easier to analyze the comments with the uses of visualization and it capture data from

terrorist group. Accordingly, to Aly (2016), she talks about how communication between the

receiver and transmitter as a dynamic like Facebook and twitter and encourager exchange

between audience and the transmitter.

Some may believe that terrorist using social media and news coverage helps prevent their

attacks around the world. However, it has been proved that while terrorist using social is helping

them gain more attention, spreading violence, recruit new terrorist, and communicate with other

from far distance. Researchers Imran Awan who wrote cyber-extremism: ISIS and the power of

social media talks about how terrorist uses social media as a tool of terror. Isis has been using

social media like YouTube to attracted thousands of views to comment and reposting. This helps

terrorist organization to attracted huge audience and recruited many other Muslim to join ISIS.

Terrorist group does not only use social media to recruit it’s to create ideological stance and

spread terror. Terrorist uses twitter to post terrible imagines, send quickly messages, and retweet

post by followers. Twitter is one of the most spreading information on the plant because one

retweet could lead to thousands and millions. Social media is one of the powerful tools in this

generation and centuries.

In conclusion, it is cleared that social media and the news media helps terrorists to

communicate with each other. The internet and news coverage benefit terrorist organizations by

revolutionized operating methods. The benefits of social media analysis operation planning,

cyber-attacks, and simply spread fear through the internet. Terrorist organizations have many

opportunities in life with social media and new coverage as it was discussed earlier, interacting

with their audience, planning operation, and communication with far distance. All of these
advantages that terrorist have on us, we could use them too by countering their plans. As we

could see social media and the media plays a big role in this generations and help the

terrorist with more opportunities to gain publicity.

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