Banning ISIS from US social media - it won't work and here's why

This guy has the idea of diminishing ISIS' PR capabilities by banning them from US social media sites:

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/02/25/opinion/poe-terrorism-social-media/index.html

He's correct that there's little to no value to US intelligence in giving them access to social media, and for the sake of this argument I'll assume that a terrorist organization should not have free speech rights, because the biggest problem with this idea has gone entirely unnoticed by him.

If they were kept off of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Liveleak, even if they could be banned from the Internet entirely to the extent that is humanly possible - there are other ways they could get their messages out which are borderline or completely impossible to block. Torrents, darknets, and most unstoppable of all, sneakernets. The ban would succeed at keeping their posts "out of plain sight" so that Average Joe internet surfer won't stumble across them directly, but - and here's the core of the problem - that means nothing.

Their messages will still get out because the media wants to show them to us. They want those eyeballs, and will scour torrent sites, set up scraper scripts to watch darknet sites constantly for updates, or put reporters in combat zones to collect videos from cell phones and flash drives and send them back to headquarters to report on what ISIS is doing to all of us. They do nearly all of the work in getting ISIS' material out there. Al Qaeda got many of their messages out on VHS, audio tapes, and pamphlets. We still got them, because the media wanted us to see them. So it's not a question of whether you want to censor terrorists, but whether you want to censor what your own news organizations can report on.

Why does anyone want to censor them? If there is anything that will put an end to them it's their own message. It's retarded.

Plus, like you said... it's impossible to stop it when it's sensational for world media click-thru ads.

Exactly. Their major "PR capabilities" consist of doing terrorist stuff that gets splashed all over international news.

the best way to deal with them is to ignore them and let their neighbors in the Middle East take care of them... let them have all the facetweetspace accounts that they want.. maybe we could use our assets to tell the locals when they are having one of their big parades where they all pile into Toyota trucks and drive thru a newly conquered town showing off their guns so that they could do a recreation of the "highway of death" from the end of Gulf War 1.. do that a few times and they won't want to go out in public..

I don't really have a problem with them tweeting and such. Any reasonable persons sees the messages for what they are. The only real danger is that some may be inspired to join them by the messages. I can think of few better outcomes for someone who would respond to such things then have them traveling over to the sand pit and get shot in the face.

Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote: Why does anyone want to censor them? If there is anything that will put an end to them it's their own message. It's retarded.

This, when I come across one of them, I thoroughly enjoy picking apart their entire ideology to the dismay of their followers. I hope I contributed to at least one of them killing themselves.

The 72 male or goat virgins meme's have been used several times.

In reply to novaderrik:

I didn't think they were wanting to go out in public since the A-10's have been on the prowl.....

yamaha wrote: In reply to novaderrik: I didn't think they were wanting to go out in public since the A-10's have been on the prowl.....

i see pics like this on an almost weekly basis:

it's what military types call a "target rich environment".. think of what an A10, Apache, or Spectre could do to one of these parades..

Update: Well Twitter banned them, which pissed them off greatly (hahaha!) but has now made Twitter a target:

www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/02/us-mideast-crisis-twitter-idUSKBN0LY1BT20150302

I say remove the reigns. Let anyone who would like to stand up and be counted with the enemy do so. Get them all into one general area and grind them into the sand under the collective boot of a large, joint military force.

Someone should use some back door Contra style deal to put these guys into all black uniforms complete with the ISIS stamp.

I'm typically very anti-war, but I completely support military action so long as the Saudis and Iranians are right there with us, and so long as it doesn't become another guerrilla war. Unfortunately, as soon as ISIS feels threatened it will start putting its forces into street clothing and we'll back where we started.

In reply to novaderrik:

Even with precision weapons, we haven't been targeting cities....and whatever acronym these douchebags are calling themselves this week are probably still using stock photos and videos from early to mid last year. They aren't moving in convoys now.

i'm no fan of terrorists, but we have free speech laws to protect unpopular speech. popular speech doesn't need protection.

then, we claim to want net neutrality enforced by the government, but are okay with a huge privately held social media entity deciding for us what content is acceptable.

i am troubled. if we really had these kind of moral compunction, where were they for Westboro, or other domestic social justice groups happy to espouse violence for their fellow man? Is it now okay because its for foreigners?

just a thought...

As noted originally there's no way to stop them so why try? I also like the idea of using their tweets and such to locate targets. Does anybody remember recently the Russian soldier who was on one or the other social media sites and gave his position away inside Ukraine, even though the Russian government was saying there were no troops there? One or another of these ISIS idiots is bound to do something similar...

Then there's the speculation that the Iraqi military won't be ready to take Mosul back by spring. Some assclown in the US military leaked that; how stupid can someone be? The LAST thing you do is let your enemy know where/when/level of preparation.

madmallard wrote: ...we claim to want net neutrality enforced by the government, but are okay with a huge privately held social media entity deciding for us what content is acceptable...

I am pretty certain the common "free speech" concept does not apply to private corporations. It's their servers, their app, they are not required to allow any and all conversations on them (e.g. there are games / apps for kids that have very high speech restrictions).

If there was an app that supported / allowed these conversations and the government wanted to shut them down, then that is likely a free speech issue.

Curmudgeon wrote: ...Then there's the speculation that the Iraqi military won't be ready to take Mosul back by spring. Some assclown in the US military leaked that; how stupid can someone be? The LAST thing you do is let your enemy know where/when/level of preparation.

Precisely. Now they will be wholly unprepared when they DO attack. Or will they?

In reply to aircooled:

its not that i expect it apply to the corporation, or anything.

i was merely pointing out the vast contradiction in behavior/expectation of the people.

madmallard wrote: In reply to aircooled: its not that i expect it apply to the corporation, or anything. i was merely pointing out the vast contradiction in behavior/expectation of the people.

I oppose net neutrality(because hello public utility, yay more bureaucracy and taxes) and already knew Twitter could restrict who could or could not use their services.....because, well you know, I'm not a typical mouth breather who doesn't know better.

madmallard wrote: then, we claim to want net neutrality enforced by the government, but are okay with a huge privately held social media entity deciding for us what content is acceptable.

This doesn't have anything to do with net neutrality...net neutrality is basically about maintaining the status quo that existed until ISPs got greedy enough to have ideas like charging you or Netflix more money to keep you connected to Netflix. Net neutrality says they can't do that bullE36 M3.

yamaha wrote: In reply to novaderrik: Even with precision weapons, we haven't been targeting cities....and whatever acronym these douchebags are calling themselves this week are probably still using stock photos and videos from early to mid last year. They aren't moving in convoys now.

How much genocide and brutal massacring did those Westboro idiots commit? Not really apples to apples here.

Also, I am hoping that the US gov said that they were going to retake city A on this date as a way to keep city B unprepared for the real siege.

GameboyRMH wrote:

madmallard wrote: then, we claim to want net neutrality enforced by the government, but are okay with a huge privately held social media entity deciding for us what content is acceptable.

This doesn't have anything to do with net neutrality...net neutrality is basically about maintaining the status quo that existed until ISPs got greedy enough to have ideas like charging you or Netflix more money to keep you connected to Netflix. Net neutrality says they can't do that bullE36 M3.

why can't they? streaming movies uses a LOT of bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money. shouldn't the people that use more of it pay for using more of it?

novaderrik wrote:

GameboyRMH wrote:

madmallard wrote: then, we claim to want net neutrality enforced by the government, but are okay with a huge privately held social media entity deciding for us what content is acceptable.

This doesn't have anything to do with net neutrality...net neutrality is basically about maintaining the status quo that existed until ISPs got greedy enough to have ideas like charging you or Netflix more money to keep you connected to Netflix. Net neutrality says they can't do that bullE36 M3.

why can't they? streaming movies uses a LOT of bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money. shouldn't the people that use more of it pay for using more of it?

Bandwidth isn't a resource you can use up like water...the big bandwidth users already pay for big bandwidth connections, but for some reason the ISPs want more on top of that. Furthermore, it will turn ISPs into the toll-gate operators of Internet-based businesses (or even people who use a lot of bandwidth), which to me seems far, far worse than some nebulous fear of taxes and over-governance from using rules to maintain the status quo.

There are already ISPs that are also cable companies and would love to stamp out your online video options.

Rusnak_322 wrote:

yamaha wrote: In reply to novaderrik: Even with precision weapons, we haven't been targeting cities....and whatever acronym these douchebags are calling themselves this week are probably still using stock photos and videos from early to mid last year. They aren't moving in convoys now.

How much genocide and brutal massacring did those Westboro idiots commit? Not really apples to apples here. Also, I am hoping that the US gov said that they were going to retake city A on this date as a way to keep city B unprepared for the real siege.

I'm confused here, what are you saying and does it have any relevance to the conversation?

This thread delivers!