Hashtag warfare: Anti-ISIS coalition looks to enhance its online messaging

The U.S.-led military coalition battling the Islamic State group is expanding its online messaging efforts, launching a new digital hub intended to showcase the campaign's scope and successes, and making more deliberate moves on social media.

The website, Inherentresolve.mil, launched March 31. It's intended to complement the coalition's efforts on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where ISIS has proven relentlessly adept both at luring new fighters to its cause and promoting fear by glamorizing its most gruesome violence.

The site will house a variety of media, from news releases and relevant numerical data to photos, video and material currently posted only to the coalition's social media feeds. U.S. officials hope the effort will help inform not only the American public, but that of the coalition's 60-plus partner nations.

Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, as the coalition is known, has also been incorporating strategic hashtags, such as“#NoToDaesh,” into its online messaging.
Use of the term "Da’esh" is intended to leverage a regional colloquialism and take a jab at ISIS, said Col. Christopher Garver, a spokesman for the coalition.

“We use the name Da'esh because our partners in the Middle East refer to ISIS or ISIL as Da'esh,” he said. ... “Da'esh is also translated as ‘to trample down and crush’ or ‘bigot who imposes his ideas on others.’ ISIL does not like the term Da'esh and has outlawed its use in the parts of Iraq and Syria it controls.

"As former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said, ‘Da'esh hates being referred to by this term, and what they don't like has an instinctive appeal to me.’”