Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE MEDIA IMPACTS TERRORISM ORGANIZATION 1

Social Media and The Media Impacts Terrorism Organization

Manuel Coronel

Arizona State University

Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE MEDIA IMPACTS TERRORISM ORGANIZATION 2

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. Overall,

terrorist uses social media and the media to market themselves around the world.

Social media plays a major role in the terrorist organization because it provides

communication benefits. How terrorist benefit with social media is that terrorist could recruit,

create different groups, avoid getting caught, etc. In the article, Terrorism the Internet and the

Social Media Advantage: Exploring how terrorist organizations exploit aspects of the internet,

social media and how these same platforms could be used to counter-violent extremism, it talked

about how terrorist organization is developing with social media communication ability. For

example, it says in the article, “terrorism as being symbolic communication that consists of four

distinct pieces of a communication formula, all of which are needed to achieve the goal of

spreading terror” (Bertram 2016). In this passage, Bertram tells us how terrorist organizations

have a way to spread their communication through the internet and reaching their goal to spread
Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE MEDIA IMPACTS TERRORISM ORGANIZATION 3

fear through the U.S.. Second, groups of terrorist organizations like ISIS and jihadist are showing

an example how the media and big events are being in played with terrorist. The media and

terrorist are somewhat a powerful relationship. In the article, The Boston Game and the ISIS

Match: Terrorism, Media, and Sport, it talked about how terrorists are using the media to spread

their terror to the world and shows the world how terrorist act inhumanity. For example, in the

article it says, “social media during this ubiquitous era is allows discussion of outrage by its

users to be expressed when it comes to terrorist-related events, so too does television, through

the act of sound and images, allow its viewers to feel as if they were actually part of what is

viewed behind the screen”( Galily, Yarchi, Tamir, and Samuel-Azran 2016). In this passage, it’s

talks about how terrorists are using social media to spread fear through the internet by making

the viewers upset by seeing horrible images and videos. The goal of using the media is to gained

worldwide attention to show that terrorists will always be a part of the media and frighten the

citizens. On the other hand, it talks about how social media is used for counter-terrorism and to

gain intelligence with terrorist organizations through social media. for example, in the previous

article it says, “viewing the social media presence as a tool for collecting intelligence, conducting

digital counter-operations and also overtly discrediting terrorist organizations in their own digital

space, counter-violent extremism strategists and policy makers may make gains against terrorist

organizations” (Bertram 2016). It’s telling us that while terrorist organization are using social

media, we could find strategies and analysis on what they plan on doing in the near future.
Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE MEDIA IMPACTS TERRORISM ORGANIZATION 4

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.

Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE MEDIA IMPACTS TERRORISM ORGANIZATION 5

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