Terror, Online and Off: Recent Trends in Islamic State Propaganda Operations

"Moreover, the jury is still out on the crucial issue of whether a decline in online propaganda capabilities is indicative of a concomitant decline in offline propaganda. It is not, and has never been, safe to assume that online trends are mirrored offline, and vice versa. No amount of big data analytics can provide insight into the offline side of the equation, in which ground level media operatives—whom the Islamic State celebrates as “martyrdom-seeker[s] without a belt”—lead the group’s in-theater communication endeavors.

The fact of the matter is that much, if not most, of the Islamic State’s propaganda is primarily designed and deployed for offline purposes. During recent field interviews in Marawi—a Filipino city just liberated from affiliates of the Islamic State—a consistent theme expressed to us by the local population was that the bulk of ISIL’s information assault was communicated via offline propaganda—e.g. face-to-face interactions and written materials like pamphlets and letters. Some citizens told us that Islamic State officials had visited their homes during the siege to explain the intent of their presence in the city, while a number of local Muslim clerics who had signed a fatwa condemning the group claimed to have received a series of personally addressed death threat letters. We heard similar descriptions of the dominance of offline propaganda methods at a local level when conducting interviews in 2015 and 2016 with activists living in parts of Syria and Iraq that were held by the Islamic State at the time."