Empowering ISIS Opponents on Twitter
This RAND Perspective operationalizes earlier findings that ISIS opponents on Twitter outnumber supporters six to one, laying out a two-track countermessaging approach: bottom-up work with influential Arab-world Twitter users to generate authentic counter-ISIS content (since the U.S. government itself lacks credibility with at-risk populations), and top-down messaging by U.S. and partner governments and NGOs that uses data-driven market segmentation to tailor distinct themes to distinct communities. The authors argue that despite social media's novelty, the best practices are familiar commercial marketing logic—identify and empower influencers with training and content, tie the social media effort into a broader campaign to undermine extremism, and continuously measure impact to refine the approach.