By Elliot Suthers
It’s safe to say that Twitter has successfully infiltrated every level of society when the notoriously technophobic Taliban begins pushing its anti-coalition rhetoric in 140 characters or less.
That’s exactly what happened late last week. Though the Taliban’s account has been somewhat active for several months, their most recent messages are squarely targeting a Western audience, with their native Pashto being dropped in favor of the Language of the Infidels. Or as we call it, English.
Hypocritically, while ruling Afghanistan, the Taliban banned not only the Internet, but also much more commonplace technologies like television and Discmans. Now their publicity machine is embracing the digital revolution, engaging the media and just about anyone else who’ll listen to them. Currently, the feed has close to 3,000 followers, but returns the favor to only a select few — 12, to be precise, including, strangely enough, a U.S. Army Logistics Officer and a UK-based charity that supports returning veterans.
And for one reason or another, be it a morbid fascination or a genuine interest in what @alemarahweb has to say, it’s working: as of Friday afternoon, the feed had become so popular that the once familiar Fail Whale made its triumphant coasting on a wave of interest and curiosity in the Jihadi Twitter account.
I, for one, am surprised that it took as long as it did for the Taliban to discover Twitter.
The short message platform is perfectly suited to their needs. It’s instant, unfiltered, accessible and completely and unabashedly biased toward the publisher. The group has regularly posted wildly exaggerated accounts of their own effectiveness in Pashto. Now that the posts are accessible to the English-speaking world, it’s easy to imagine an impressionable Western public becoming unable to distinguish between fact and opium-addled fantasy.
Twitter is, no doubt, breaking new ground in creating a more fluid newscycle, but is it doing so at the peril of accountability? That’s not for me to say. But as it becomes more and more of a resource for journalists and the general public alike, users will be bombarded with more and more information of unverifiable quality and the responsibility will be incumbent on the reader to discern the truthful from the fictitious. The filter’s been removed and the Taliban has as much to say as anyone else — and the same hashtags with which to say it.
NATO and the U.S. should take this as a shot across the bow, as yet another example of the group’s efforts to engage the Afghan population and their other stakeholders. Orchestrated from who knows where and with a minimum of funding, the Talibani team have managed to create a successful outreach strategy that many in the Fortune 500 would be proud of.
Whether you agree with their content or not, their tactics such as mass-texting programs to live-streamed webcasts have been a resounding success.
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Elliott Suthers, a native of Australia, is a VP at Spector & Associatesand former staffer at United Nations’ Development Programme in Washington, D.C, and the Republican National Committee. He can be reached at Elliott [at] SpectorPR [dot] com.
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