Chapter 1

Understanding Social Media's Impact on Global Security

In December 2010, a Facebook status update sparked a chain of events that led to the downfall of three governments. Meanwhile, YouTube videos helped convince and motivate an isolated young man to gun down American servicemen. A few months later, tweets and BlackBerry messages helped rioters loot with precision and spread chaos in one of the most powerful and monitored cities in the world. Meanwhile, gangs in the West used Facebook to glorify their acts of violence and inflame vicious cycles of violence. These events shared common factors—the most apparent being the unique role of social media technology. This chapter illustrates social media's impact on global security, comprising international, national, and local security issues. Specifically, it describes how social media has helped people globally organize revolutions and riots, terrorists recruit and encourage attacks, and gangs glorify and spread violence. It ends with a discussion highlighting the need to appreciate social media's impact on security and sets you on a journey to discovering how you can use social media technologies and crowdsourcing methods to secure your community, country, and planet.

Organizing Revolutions and Riots

To most, social media conjures up thoughts of celebrities tweeting embarrassing pictures, long-forgotten friends connecting with each other on Facebook, and aspiring performers posting videos of their antics on YouTube. But in recent years, thoughts and discussions surrounding social media have led to heavy subjects such as revolutions in the Middle East and riots in the West. The 2011 Arab Spring and 2011 London riots are controversial yet powerful examples of how social media is impacting matters of security. Activists and individuals globally have begun using social media as a way to connect with each other, amplify their voices, coordinate actions against government and law enforcement, and publicize their side of the story—actions that have changed the world. To begin appreciating why it is important to understand and use social media's influence on security, we will start in Tunisia.

Arab Spring

In late 2010, a 26-year-old Tunisian man named Mouhamed Bouazizi decided to kill himself. Unable to find a job, he became an unlicensed street vendor, but faced constant harassment and humiliation from the local police. One day, a policewoman confiscated his goods and slapped him, driving him to post a status update on Facebook, available at this link: http://arabcrunch.com/2011/01/the-last-facebook-status-update-of-bouazizi-who-set-him-self-on-fire-marking-starting-the-tunisian-revolution.html. Roughly translated and paraphrased, the status said, “I am lost and don't know what to do.”

He then complained to the local governor, who ignored him. Incensed, he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. A few days later, another unemployed and distraught Tunisian man jumped off a building. Soon the news of the deaths spread throughout the country, igniting protests leading to the overthrow of the Tunisian government.

In this and the following cases, do not lose yourself in identifying the myriad factors such as skyrocketing food prices, corruption, and lack of political rights that motivated people to protest. What is important is appreciating how Tunisians (and eventually other people) used social media to share with each other and the world the news about their country's problems, to help organize protests, and to help delegitimize and fight back against government and security forces.

Official Tunisian media including the local newspapers and radio stations did not discuss the suicides. Tunisians, a young, literate, and computer-savvy people, used mainstream social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter and blogs to share their thoughts about how they can improve their situation—specifically, overthrowing the government. Indeed, from late December 2010 to early January 2011, Tunisian membership of Facebook jumped from a steady 1.8 million users to more than 2 million almost overnight.¹ Figure 1.1 shows a graphical representation of the growth in Facebook in Tunisia in late 2010-early 2011.

Figure 1.1 Tunisian Facebook growth in late 2010–early 2011

When the government started to crack down on the ensuing protests, Tunisians started posting videos and pictures on social media sites such as YouTube and Flickr about oppressive government action, which further incensed the population and motivated more people to join in the protests. Videos of government forces committing violence against protestors proved especially motivating. Meanwhile, Tunisian diaspora groups used social media to publicize the plight of their relatives back home. International monitoring groups and news organizations like Al-Jazeera and the BBC started noticing the tweets and YouTube videos pouring out of Tunisia and the diaspora. They began running stories on the protests, which caught the world's attention and much of its support. Eventually, the government cracked under the pressure and the autocratic ruler, Ben Ali, gave up power and fled. Figure 1.2 shows a timeline of the initial events of the Arab Spring.

Figure 1.2 Early Arab Spring timeline

People in neighboring countries took notice, and motivated by similar factors, they also began protesting. In many cases, people in neighboring countries employed more sophisticated social media techniques. Young Egyptian activists spearheaded the aggressive use of Twitter to share logistical information concerning the times and locations of protests, whereabouts of government forces, and even methods to protect protestors from tear gas and other police action. Allegedly, these same activists had helped the Tunisians use social media to organize protests and win the public relations war. Some reports indicate that the international human rights organizations and the U.S. government had helped train and equip these activists with technology.²

Sympathetic and curious people outside of Egypt were also able to use social media to publicize the protests. Many non-Egyptians created crowdmaps (explained in Chapter 7) and other social media platforms that geo-spatially displayed the locations and outcomes of protests in Cairo. News organizations including Al-Jazeera created intuitive and aesthetic websites that featured real-time feeds of tweets from protestors. As Figure 1.3 shows, the Arab Spring and specifically, the Egyptian protests were some of the most popular topics on Twitter. Other topics typically receive significantly fewer mentions. According to Twitter, the hashtags #egypt and #jan25, which refer to the Egyptian protests, were respectively the most and eight most popular hashtags on Twitter in 2011.³ Such growing global interest eventually pushed Western governments to encourage Mubarak to step down.

Figure 1.3 Arab Spring mentions on Twitter from January–March 2011

The Egyptians often used more advanced methods to disseminate information because the Mubarak government was more vigilant and aggressive than the Ali government. To ensure government forces did not monitor social media sites to determine the locations and timings of protests, the Egyptian protestors tweeted to secretive hashtags made up of nonsense words. Only activists and protestors in the know understood what tweets to these hashtags meant, so only they knew where protests were going to happen. Many Egyptian activists noticed that during the 2009 Iranian Green Revolution protests, the Iranian government monitored social media sites to identify activists, and then capture and torture them. So the Egyptians also used secretive hashtags and other anonymization techniques, such as the creation of multiple Twitter accounts, to make it difficult for government forces to identify and capture them. Eventually, the protests in Egypt led to Mubarak's overthrow. Soon Libya and Syria also became engulfed in protests. Libyan protests led to a bitter conflict, and the eventual overthrow and death of Gaddafi. Weeks later, a bloody civil war broke out in Syria. Even far-flung countries like Malaysia (Beshir 2.0 rally) and the United States (Occupy Wall Street protests) saw protests partly inspired by the ideals, revolutionary fervor, and the social media organizing and publicizing techniques of the Arab Spring.

Quantifying to what extent social media launched and sustained the Arab Spring is difficult. Several articles, books, and blog posts have described the role of social media during the Arab Spring and debated its contribution to the protests.^{4, 5, 6, 7} We encourage you to read them to develop a better understanding of social media's power and limitations. However, what is undeniable and the most relevant for our case is the fact that during the Arab Spring, social media technologies:

• Helped people directly involved in the Arab Spring and those sympathetic to the protestors' plight publicize their message to the international community;
• Undermined the legitimacy of government forces by showcasing vivid examples of government oppression and violence through shared videos and pictures;
• Helped protestors mobilize and coordinate action against government forces.

Even if social media use was simply one of many driving factors of the most captivating international security issues of 2011, it was a unique and significant one that cannot be ignored.

London Riots

The Arab Spring took place successfully in developing countries with an enormous population of tech-savvy and frustrated youth. However, social media's impact on security is not limited to a single part of the world. Young people have also used social media to destabilize governments and create security problems in stable Western countries. The most prominent example took place barely months after the Arab Spring, in London. While many tout the Arab Spring as the evidence of the positive impact that social media can have, most see the London riots as the evidence of the negative.

Protests and demonstrations broke out in London after the police controversially killed a young man and were not reprimanded. When police attempted to disperse a demonstration concerning the killing, violence broke out, culminating in riots and copycat riots that lasted for several days across the United Kingdom and cost hundreds of millions of pounds in damage. For now, do not focus on the economic, racial, and cultural factors that led to the riots, but on the role social media technologies, especially location-specific technologies, played in helping rioters organize and outmaneuver police forces. Also, take note of how even the police forces and the public started to use social media technologies to capture rioters and secure their communities.

Rioters used a variety of mainstream and location-specific social media technologies to communicate about the protests. They posted pictures of themselves next to stolen goods on Flickr, used a smartphone application named Sukey to identify the physical location of police forces in real time, and used BlackBerry Messenger to coordinate attacks. News organizations in Britain suggested that extensive coverage of the riots on Twitter by rioters and witnesses encouraged others to join in and prolong the rioting. During the riots, on the 8th and 9th of August 2011, Internet traffic to UK websites increased by 14 percent, and there was a staggering 2.57 million relevant tweets. Nearly 3.4 million people from the UK visited Twitter's homepage.^{8, 9, 10} Figure 1.4 shows a timeline of the 2011 London riots.

Figure 1.4 2011 London riots timeline

Location-specific technologies such as BlackBerry Messenger, that allowed messages to be private and specific to physical space or an individual's contact list, technologically prohibited police forces and the public at large to eavesdrop on the rioters' conversations. Rioters were thus able to quickly and confidentially discuss logistics concerning rioting. The UK government found it legally and technologically difficult to gain access to those confidential messages or shut down those technologies, some of which were also being used by emergency and law enforcement personnel responding to the riots.

Again, quantifying the role social media played in prolonging and intensifying the London riots is difficult. However, the riots showed that social media technologies:

• Can help create and exacerbate security problems in even the most secure and stable parts of the world;
• Become even more complicated for security forces to deal with when they involve location-specific technologies. In Chapter 4, we look more closely at issues regarding location-specific social media technologies, but the gist is that they will make social media data analytics and event forecasting that much more difficult, and their use has only just begun.

Only a few months after the Arab Spring, groups developed even more advanced methods to use social media technologies to positively and negatively impact security.

Recruiting Terrorists and Encouraging Attacks

Populations revolting for freedom and young people lashing out at their communities are not the only ones who use social media to create domestic and international security problems. Although some “analysts” go overboard with terrorists' ability to use social media, terrorists do use social media to recruit, plan attacks, and spread terror. Their methods are numerous and often ingenious.¹¹ In fact, terrorists seem much more knowledgeable than law enforcement and government about social media and how to exploit it. Assessing how much social media helps terrorists is difficult, but social media has clearly amplified their abilities and opportunities. The case of Arid Uka's recruitment and terrorist operation exemplifies the emerging threats governments face.¹²

While the Arab Spring was capturing the world's imagination and attention, a 21-year-old man spent days poring over jihadi propaganda on the Internet. He eventually shot and killed several American servicemen at the Frankfurt airport. Again, our focus is not on the social and psychological factors that motivate a young man to become a jihadist-motivated terrorist, but on how social media helped terrorists convince and motivate a person to commit murder.

Terrorists affiliated with al-Qaeda, extreme right-wing organizations, and otherwise, have long used the Internet to spread propaganda about their ideology and attacks, distribute training guides, and recruit others. They host forums where they discuss how to create bombs, post videos to YouTube demonizing their enemies, and ingratiate themselves with possible recruits by chatting with them over Twitter, Facebook, and even video game worlds like the World of Warcraft. As Table 1.1 shows, groups like the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Shabaab even have official Twitter accounts and they are well versed in the modern practices of online brand management and interactive public relations. The marketing departments of companies could learn a thing or two from them.

Table 1.1 Terrorist Groups on Twitter, as of May 2012

Most often, virtual interactions between terrorist recruiters and curious, at-risk youth are followed up with physical meetings. What makes Arid Uka's case so interesting is that he allegedly never physically met any of his compatriots. He was radicalized virtually. He routinely read jihadi literature on blogs, talked with jihadists on Facebook, and even performed quests with them on World of Warcraft. The online conversations and quests helped cement Uka's relationship with jihadists and in turn helped convince him to commit an act of terror. In fact, according to Uka, a Facebook post prompted him to launch the attack. The night before the attack, Uka saw a video on Facebook showing American soldiers supposedly raping a Muslim girl. Uka did not realize the video was from a fictional movie.

Terrorists have been recruiting and carrying out attacks without social media technologies for centuries. However, social media has enabled them to:

• Amplify their voice and reach more potential recruits globally;
• Publicize and glorify their cause and side of the story;
• Streamline information operations before, during, and after operations.

Glorifying and Promoting Gang Culture and Violence

The ubiquity and democratic nature of social media means that antagonistic actors at every level of society can and will use it, including members of gangs and criminal organizations. Gangs use social media to fight virtual turf wars, glorify gang culture and violence, and recruit others. Their acts may not be as sensational as those of protestors and terrorists, but they still can seriously harm communities.

Gang members primarily use social media as an avenue for spreading propaganda, allegedly replacing the traditional mode of spraying graffiti on buildings. They post pictures of their logos on Facebook walls, tweet pictures of themselves doing drugs, and even post videos of them attacking innocent bystanders. Comments denouncing and threatening rival gangs often run alongside the pictures and videos. Often, gang use of social media is creative and aimed at setting traps for their enemies. Irish gang members have allegedly sent their rivals messages from fake girls, enticing them to appear at a certain location at a specific time. The gang members then ambush the tricked rival and attack him. ^{13, 14} Suggesting that social media motivates gang members to commit crimes and violence is stretching social media's influence. However, social media does make it easier for gangs to further inflame gang feuds. The killing of 5-year old Nizzel George in Minneapolis illustrates how inflamed gang feuds result in serious harm to communities.¹⁵

The feud started in August 2010, when 16-year old Scarface gang member Juwon “Skitz” Osborn allegedly shot and killed a Y.N.T. gang member. A month later, the Y.N.T. gang seemingly retaliated and shot Osborn twice, eventually killing him. Osborn's friends started a group called the “Skitz Squad” and vowed to seek revenge. Skitz Squad and Y.N.T. traded barbs, eventually using Facebook to threaten each other. They memorialized Osborn and reminded each other of his death, and posted pictures of gang members flashing gang hand signs that promoted their gang and that denounced the opposing gang. The threats and trash talk online grew at a rapid rate, eventually culminating in a hail of bullets at a house where Nizzel George lived.

Over the last few years, gang use of social media has grown considerably and will likely continue to grow. Generally, the size of a gang's social media presence correlates with their international fame and longevity. Table 1.2, derived from a 2011 study¹³, provides an idea of the extent to which gangs and criminal organizations are active on social media. Often, they have multiple accounts on the same social media site.¹³

Table 1.2 Criminal Organizations and Gangs on Social Media, as of 2011

Gangs and criminal organizations use social media to the same ends as terrorists. They use it to bolster their status and efforts, and specifically, to:

• Spread propaganda about their lives and increase its attractiveness to young people;
• Trash talk each other and inflame already tense situations;
• Plan and use it to carry out attacks.

Acknowledging Social Media's Impact

Social media will increasingly affect global security in positive, negative, and ambiguous ways. Setting aside the case of the Arab Spring and related protests, when it comes to security issues, social media is usually seen as a threat to stability and peace. However, apart from the Arab Spring, some examples of people using social media effectively to combat violence and secure communities exist. For example, during the London riots, the police and the public-at-large used social media to fight back against the rioters and improve security. The London police scanned through CCTV images to find pictures of rioters. They then posted the pictures on the popular photo-sharing site Flickr and asked people to contact them if they identified the person in the picture.¹⁶ Also, British citizens used Twitter hashtags such as #riotcleanup to help organize public cleaning crews and neighborhood watches.¹⁷

Although, such effective and beneficial use of social media is increasing, it is still rare. We have researched and dealt with actors on both sides of the security arena concerning their use of social media, and the gap between the “bad” and “good” guys is frankly appalling. Simply, the bad guys have been far more adaptive and creative with new media technology. You can find many cases of how terrorists, criminals, rioters, and others are using social media data and technologies to increase their effectiveness and create unique security problems that governments today do not even understand, let alone address. Governments and security officials are trying to catch up but they sometimes do it in questionable ways that ends up setting back the case for using social media for global security. The introduction described one such case involving the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This book is an attempt to level the field and put social media data and technologies in the hands of individuals and groups vying for peace, security, and liberty.

If you are not yet persuaded that social media is impacting global security, for good and ill, then we encourage you to look through cited articles and books. If you still are not convinced, use the book as a shovel and commence burying your head in the sand. If you are adequately convinced, let us start discussing how you can also use social media data and technologies to improve global security and solve your relevant problems. However, before you can use social media, you need to understand what it is. Chapter 2 will kick off the journey by explaining exactly what social media is, why it is so popular, and how people use it.

Summary

• Criminals, terrorists, and rioters are using social media to amplify their voices, recruit, and plan their operations.
• During the Arab Spring, protestors throughout the Middle East used social media to organize and help overthrow their governments.
• During the London riots, young people used localized social media platforms to coordinate looting and defy the police.
• Terrorists use social media to spread propaganda about their case, demonize their targets, and recruit others to carry out attacks.
• Gangs use social media to threaten each other, recruit members, and plan violence and other criminal activities.
• Due to rioter, terrorist, and criminal use of social media, governments everywhere are facing new, more robust non-state threats that they increasingly do not understand.
• Some groups and governments are using social media effectively to overthrow oppressive governments and secure communities. However, most are largely unaware of the potential social media offers and how they can and should use it.

Notes

1. Socialbakers.com. (2012) “Tunisia: Country Reports: Twitter/Facebook.” Accessed: 25 April 2012. http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/tunisia

2. Twitter. (2011) “Year in Review.” Accessed: 15 August 2012. http://yearinreview.twitter.com/en/hottopics.html

3. Nixon, R. (2011) “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings.” New York Times. Accessed: 14 August 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html?pagewanted=all

4. Ghonim, W. (2012) Revolution 2.0: The Power of the People is Greater Than the People in Power. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston.

5. Council on Foreign Relations. (2011) The New Arab Revolt: What Happened, What it Means, and What Comes Next. CFR, New York.

6. Pollack, K.M., et al. (2011) The Arab Awakening: America and the Transformation of the Middle East. Brookings Institution Press, Washington, DC.

7. Wright, R. (2011) Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World. Simon & Shuster, New York.

8. The Guardian (2011) “Datablog: Data Journalism During the Riots: What We Know. What We Don't.” Accessed: 25 April 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/dec/09/data-journalism-reading-riots

9. Mashable.com (2011) “London Riots and Twitter.” Accessed: 25 April 2012. http://mashable.com/2011/08/09/london-riots-twitter/

10. Gold, J. (2011) “UK Riots: An Infographic.” Accessed: 6 May 2012. http://visual.ly/uk-riots-infographic

11. Cilluffo, F.J., Cozzens, J.B., and Ranstorp, M. (2010) Foreign Fighters: Trends, Trajectories, and Conflicts Zones. George Washington University: Homeland Security Policy Institute. Accessed 25 April 2012. http://www.gwumc.edu/hspi/policy/report_foreignfighters501.cfm

12. Bartsch, M., et al. (2011) “Radical Islamic Roots of the Frankfurt Attack.” Der Spiegel Online. Accessed 25 April 2012. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,748910,00.html

13. Decary-Hetu, D. and Morselli, C. (2011) “Gang Presence in Social Network Sites.” International Journal of Cyber Criminology. Accessed 14 August 2012. http://www.cybercrimejournal.com/davidcarlo2011julyijcc.pdf

14. Finger, S. (2012) “Police: Street Gangs Embrace Social Media, Too.” Wichita Eagle. Accessed: 14 August 2012. http://www.kansas.com/2012/06/10/2366765/police-street-gangs-embrace-social.html

15. McKinney, M. (2012) “Gangs Sometimes Fire First Shots Online.” Star Tribune. Accessed: 14 August 2012. http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/162483976.html?refer=y

16. Couts, A. (2011) “London Riots: Police Use Flickr to Help Catch Looters.” Digital Trends. Accessed: 14 August 2012. http://www.digitaltrends.com/international/london-riots-police-use-flickr-to-help-catch-looters/

17. Stone, Z. (2011) “Retweet to Rebuild: Social Media Helps Clean Up London Post-Riots.” Good Culture. Accessed: 14 August 2012. http://www.good.is/post/retweet-to-rebuild-social-media-is-helping-cleanup-london-post-riots/