The U.S. State Dept. is using more than 300 of its social media accounts to monitor and try to counter the use of Twitter, Facebook and other sites to recruit people, mostly youth, into radical Islam and jihad.
“There are 90,000 pro-ISIL tweets or other social media responses every day,” State Dept. spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Tuesday.
“We’re definitely beaten by volume, but we don’t believe that ISIL is an invincible force on social media,” she added. “So what we’re working on now is aggregating and curating and amplifying existing content, so that means utilizing the 300-plus State Department social media accounts run by embassies, consulates, and individuals. It means also coordinating that with the social media accounts of other government agencies. It means expanding and giving more tools to the CSCC.
“We have a new head of CSCC who will be leading this effort to continue to improve our coordination and make sure we’re approaching this in the smartest, most strategic way. And as you mentioned, there are obviously best practices that we can learn from other countries. And part of this is not only sharing that but also determining who the right voices are.”
The good news from Foggy Bottom is that the experts understand they cannot use an American approach to counter a Middle East mentality. Psaki said, “We certainly are not under the illusion that the United States is the best voice in many of these cases.”
If they had taken that approach towards the “peace process” long ago they would look a lot less dumb today.