NEW MEDIA: Online Propaganda War Heats Up

By Lynette Lee Corporal

BANGKOK, Jun 17 (AMF) - For the past several years, extremist groups such as the Taliban, have been arming themselves with a different kind of weapon — new media. The news is they are getting highly creative at it.

   "For some odd reason, I'm becoming famous," quipped the animated character Dickie in a robotic voice tinged with a slight American accent.

   Dickie is the fictional news anchor of YouTube channel 'Resistance Media' who presents news alerts about clashes in Afghanistan that "Nato and coalition forces so desperately (want to) hide from the corporate media”.
  
   The clip, the third of its kind in less than a month, is drawing curious viewers due to the novelty of it all.

   Launched in March this year by a pro-Taliban supporter who calls himself 'resistz2exist', the YouTube channel is supposedly meant to counteract the reports coming from international news reports and other media.

   "I started this channel because reports from Afghanistan (and now Pakistan) war-on-error are bigotedly reported, frequently un-reported and usually under-reported," he said on the homepage, describing mainstream media as "another messy name for considerable hopelessness... and 'one-eyed coverup'."

   Changing tactics after years of campaigning to destroy anything that has to do with technology and entertainment, which for extremist groups are "weapons of infidels to pollute the minds of believers", these same groups are now getting more creative in getting their message across.

  Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of 'Al-Quds Al-Arabi', one of the world's leading Arabic-language newspapers, says the new media could well be the venue of another kind of 'battle' waged by opposing forces.

   "(The new media) definitely have the credibility with the youth, in some cases, maybe even more than the frequently discredited mainstream media," Atwan told the AMF.
   
   There is, of course, a huge difference between terrorist and violent groups using new media and claiming that mainstream media does not report well well enough, and genuine alternative media that grow because of audiences’ desire for different information from what they read in mainstream media.

   But Atwan says there is a tendency for the media "to be biased along the lines of the regime it is serving", especially in the so-called 'war on terror' against Islamic extremist groups.

   "For the West, this is the war on 'terror'. For Arab regimes, the people largely support the 'underdog', the Palestinians for example, and dislike the US, so the media will not risk alienating them," he explained.

   However, Atwan notes that the Arab media are generally more controlled by the state than their western counterparts because there is a perceived service to the host regimes.

   Still, he adds, there are also independent mainstream media outlets, including 'Al-Quds Al Arabi' and the Arabic-language TV network Al Jazeera, that are "at the vanguard of a new wave of satellite and Internet stations giving a more accurate picture" of the situation.

   Still, journalists are taking a long hard look at how militants are becoming more and more Internet-savvy these days.

   Freelance journalist and social activist Zaraf Iqbal, writing for the News Agency of Kashmir in May, said that the Taliban have taken to circulating their own DVDs and CDs "glorifying their collaborators and companions". This from a group notorious for blowing up cable TV transmissions, ransacking and burning DVD and music stores in the past.

   The Taliban, which controlled Afghanistan from 1992 to 2001, has been engaged in guerrilla warfare with allied forces since 2004.

   "The Taliban has changed. They are no longer anti-technology. The mobile phone has changed everything... They have learned that they will gain much more than they lose by using new media to their own advantage," journalist and blogger Nick Fielding, who has closely followed the events in Afghanistan, said in an email interview.

   According to Fielding, many Taliban supporters are young people who got displaced by the war in Afghanistan and grew up in refugee camps in Pakistan, where "they have had training that they could not have received if they had been brought up in Afghanistan".

   All of this, he added, would likely result in "further innovation and development of techniques, particularly as mobile phone use and Internet are spreading rapidly in Afghanistan itself".

   In his 'Circling the Lion' blog entry on Jun. 4, Fielding, the former 'The Sunday Times' senior reporter and 'The Mail on Sunday' investigative reporter, described the YouTube animated production as one that took "both skill and money" to make.

   "The Taliban has learned how to brand its material and has experimented with novel techniques for distributing it; for example in Afghanistan, I came across videos that were being circulated by mobile phone, using 3GP technology," said Fielding, also the co-author of 'Masterminds of Terror' and 'Defending the Realm' that both dealt with the implications of the Sep. 11 attacks in the United States.

   Islamic extremists Al-Qaeda's link with the Taliban, said Fielding, also led to the production of many video materials via the former's production house, the As-Sahab Foundation for Islamic Media Publication. The outfit is known for producing high-quality films, including iPod and cellphone videos.

   As more and more people depend less and less on traditional sources of news, mainstream media are becoming "less and less relevant" especially to young people, Fielding adds.

   This would leave the field wide open for organisations like the Taliban and other extremist Islamists to "connect with them and influence them directly", said Fielding.

   "The media should be more honest if they are to continue to provide a useful function and (continue to) have an audience," said Atwan. (END/AMF/IPSAP/LLC/JS/170609)