Social Media and the Future of the Taliban

After the fall of Afghanistan and the success of the Taliban's insurgency, there are substantial questions about how technology firms should best comport themselves in this situation. To discuss these issues, I spoke with Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council and, with Peter Singer, coauthor of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media. He is an expert in fields such as disinformation, terrorist communication, and internet policy, and recently led an initiative to help secure the integrity of the 2020 U.S. election.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

So before we get started, can you just tell folks a little bit about the thesis of LikeWar?

Emerson Brooking:

LikeWar came out in 2018, and it was an attempt to examine terrorist use of social media and, increasingly, national military use of social media. Then while the book was being written, we saw the Russian interference campaign in the 2016 election, and then the rise of white supremacist violence in the United States. We make the argument that basic social media tactics bound all these things together, and that one way to conceptualize them was as a sort of viral marketing campaign, which was using all of the same tools and tactics as your run of the mill marketing campaign, but premised on political violence.

Justin Hendrix:

So to some extent, do you see some of the themes of the book coming to life in Afghanistan right now? Clearly, we're seeing a very uncommon circumstance unfolding in Afghanistan at the moment- an insurgency from within a country that has essentially taken power. And yet the Taliban is 100% using social media to its advantage. What are they up to?

Emerson Brooking:

So, the Taliban was actually one of the reasons my co-author, Peter Singer, and I wrote our book. The Taliban joined Twitter back in 2011, and it was briefly a kind of surreal news story, because all of a sudden the Taliban were directly fighting with NATO public affairs officials on Twitter, over casualty counts or the outcomes of particular battles. And all of this was playing out in front of the eyes of the global media. So this seemed like a very new phenomenon.

Now with a bit of hindsight, I would say the story is more complicated. Actually an insurgency, the Taliban have always targeted media, and they've always sought to use new technologies to their advantage. The Taliban went online with a pretty sophisticated English language website in 2005. Then they were on Twitter in 2011. Then they jumped to WhatsApp and Telegram in 2015. By 2016, they were doing the same sorts of glossy propaganda videos and drone footage that one also saw the Islamic state producing in its propaganda. And more recently, with the draw down by the United States and ongoing diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban, that gave them a lot more legitimacy. So they came back to Twitter in a big way. And for people who've just been tuning in, the remarkable images and videos coming from Taliban accounts as they swept across Afghanistan and took Kabul is the conclusion of an internet warfare campaign that they've been waging for 15 years.

Justin Hendrix:

Courtney Radsch, in a piece in Tech Policy Press this week, says that the Taliban were not just armed with in some cases American rifles, but also with smartphones as they marched into the presidential palace in Kabul to really broadcast their victory across the world.

Emerson Brooking:

That's right. Afghanistan is one of the last places to get the internet, but Afghanistan does have the internet now. Internet and even mobile phone use was a non-factor at the time of the US invasion in 2001. But now, about 40% of Afghans have access to the internet. 90% have smartphones. So it is true that the Taliban were armed with these devices, but so is everyone else. We're dealing with a world where everyone now inhabits the same digital ecosystem.

Justin Hendrix:

We've even seen Taliban going into Clubhouse chats with folks in Afghanistan and elsewhere to talk about their goals.

Emerson Brooking:

Yeah. There's some interesting differences, culturally, and how different nations and different groups use these platforms. And in the case of Afghanistan, literacy rates still aren't that high, especially in the territories where the Taliban come from. But they are extremely adept and comfortable at audio formats. I think that accounts for the attraction of Clubhouse. But that also explains the way that some senior Taliban leaders use WhatsApp, because they don't write out long text messages. Instead, they record audio, and send audio back and forth. Sometimes, it can be quite lengthy audio. But if you come up in that society, you're also used to sort of sitting in a circle and letting elders speak one by one, by order of seniority. So it's not an unfamiliar system, it's just transplanted to the digital medium.

Justin Hendrix:

Is there an argument to be made that part of what we're seeing in Afghanistan right now, the regaining of power or, rise to power of the Taliban after 20 years of war, is that partly to do with the fact that they've been enabled by these Western social media platforms? Is there an ounce of responsibility on the platforms for helping them to burnish their image?

Emerson Brooking:

That is a tough question. To give you an example, the Taliban had been designated a dangerous organization by Facebook, and they've been banned from that platform, and the same from YouTube for a lot of years. But while a lot of Taliban propaganda hasn't been on these platforms, Taliban fighters have still had a presence. It's because the Taliban is an insurgency. That makes it definitionally very difficult to distinguish insurgent fighters from the population at large. They've always been on these platforms, and one would expect them to be on these platforms, as these platforms have increasingly become a central part of political life in Afghanistan, just the same as in the rest of the world. So, I would say that social media has helped the Taliban, but I would not say these platforms are responsible for much of the momentum that the Taliban have gathered.

The Taliban have lived in these communities. The Taliban have operated a shadow government in large parts of Afghanistan for 10 or 15 years. If they hadn't had access to Twitter, it might've changed some of their messaging to the international press, but I don't think it would have affected the power that they had on the ground much. There's actually an important contrast here with an entity like the Islamic State, which rose very abruptly out of the Syrian civil war in large part because of its extremely adept viral propaganda. And there, I think their presence on Western social media platforms was much more material to their battlefield success. But the Taliban are older than the US occupation. They are not the fault of social media companies.

Justin Hendrix:

Let's get a little bit into the response that we've seen from the social platforms to date. We know that Facebook has set up a special operations center, a SOC, which is now its standard practice when it comes to important world events. We saw them set up another special operations center, similarly, during the conflict between Israel and Palestine earlier this year. YouTube belatedly clarified that its policies won't change, that the Taliban is meant to be banned from using its platform. But Twitter is doing something a little bit different. What do you make of the response from the different platforms?

Emerson Brooking:

My gut sense is that the response from Facebook and YouTube is not sustainable. And that is the response where they've said that the Taliban are a dangerous organization and will continue to be totally banned from their platforms. That decision was made years ago, at a time when virtually all Taliban content was horrifically graphic violence, showing executions or attacks against American soldiers, that they use this recruitment material. Now, we're dealing with an insurgency that has successfully co-opted a national government. And the immediate goals of the Taliban are to consolidate their control, but to also rule the state which they have captured. And so I wonder if you take the logic of something like Facebook's ban. Does that mean that the Afghan ministry of health, when it's administered by the Taliban, will no longer have access to the global internet? How strict will these platforms be?

And I also question the strategic utility of it. Because one reason that it is important to take content moderation actions against extremist movements is to keep them from gathering momentum, to keep them from translating their will into real-world violence. Well, the Taliban already got everything they wanted. So I think it's more important that the top priority be the Afghan people. And anything that can be done to help the situation in Afghanistan remain as stable as possible. And to retain open lines of communication, to shield those Afghans who supported the US or, who supported the former Afghan government, who now find themselves terribly in harm's way.

Justin Hendrix:

So are you imagining that harsher censorship from US platforms could backfire and cause the Taliban to maybe seek to restrict or even deny the Afghan people from using these platforms?

Emerson Brooking:

I think that from everything we're seeing right now, the Taliban are desperate for international legitimacy. In fact, in the mid-nineties, before the Taliban made the decision to host Osama bin Laden, the Taliban was also seeking, and quite intent on, international legitimacy. But they were also extremely primitive in their understanding of international systems, and they were transparently barbaric. Such that they were never going to get global recognition.

The Taliban have spent the last 20 years observing the international media environment, understanding how it can be used to their benefit, or against them. And their priority right now, as I said, is to consolidate the government. And I think that some of the greatest leverage that the international community has right now is basically these content moderation policies, and these social media platforms, on which the Taliban would desperately like to maintain a presence. And I think one should not throw away that bit of leverage lightly. Because keeping those lines of communication open means it's less likely, at least immediately, of other repressive measures to keep Afghan civilians off these platforms. And the more documentation there is, and the more lines of communication, I think the more that can be done to shield the Afghan people.

Justin Hendrix:

We've certainly seen the Taliban use more sophisticated effort. We even saw a deputy leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani pen an op-ed in the New York Times explaining what the modern Taliban wants, I think, just a couple of years ago. Do you think that there is any reason to believe some of the claims? We hear the spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid saying that the Taliban is perhaps different now, that it has the interests of the Afghan people in its sights? Do you think there's any reason to believe this more sort of moderate tone that these folks are taking?

Emerson Brooking:

No. There's no reason to believe anything the Taliban says. In all their press statements going back years, they've always been very loose with the truth when it regards casualty figures. If you look at every Taliban press release ever, they never acknowledge when they're responsible for the death of an Afghan civilian. So, no. The statements from the Taliban are as self-serving as anything else. But we should understand that their top objective- more than, I think immediately imposing as harsh as Sharia that existed in the nineties- their top objective is that recognition from the international community. And that is the best leverage we have.

Justin Hendrix:

There has been this collaborative effort through the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), in order to create a kind of neutral place where the platforms can collaborate on extremist and terrorist content. Have you observed whether or not the GIFCT has had any effect or efficacy in this moment?

Emerson Brooking:

I think the most immediate impact of the GIFCT is the hash database they maintain of terrorist content. This hash database is shared among the major social media platforms, and it enables automatic content moderation of that content. I suspect that the bloodshed of the last week has generated a lot of new content to be hashed by the GIFCT. And that means that that stuff is not spreading on social media once it's been cataloged. So I'd say that is the most immediate impact of the GIFCT. Keeping as much of this violent imagery off the open internet as possible, which I think is a noble goal.

Justin Hendrix:

Do you think it can play more of a role in situations like this in the future?

Emerson Brooking:

Absolutely. Look, the strange thing about the Taliban, and this might change- but the strange thing is that they have historically not been an international jihadist movement. They’re a nationalistic movement. They are always very expressly focused on power in Afghanistan. They never shared exactly this ideology of global jihad that Al-Qaeda did, and other such groups. But I think that the Taliban's extraordinary success is going to resonate through the internet, and it will inspire other terrorist cells that have more international goals in mind. And the existence then of something like the GIFCT and that hash database will help mitigate the spread of the most obvious Taliban adjacent propaganda.

Justin Hendrix:

Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think hasn’t been discussed enough in the dialogue on these issues?

Emerson Brooking:

Something that I'm still trying to learn more about, but I find fascinating, is the adaptability of the Taliban- even within this extraordinarily repressive interpretation of Sharia. So in the nineties, the Taliban did not permit portrayals of living human beings. They didn't permit photographs or moving images, as they said this was haram. After the US invasion, around 2002- as the Taliban was really on the back foot and trying to figure out a good propaganda offensive to come back- they settled on the idea of using graphic imagery of civilian casualties from US airstrikes and attacks. And pretty soon that became, not just no longer haram, but a basic foundational principle of their propaganda.

So even within the context of this barbaric ideology, the Taliban do show a great deal of ideological flexibility when it's expedient for them to do so. So I would think as we move into the future and as events are rapidly changing, we shouldn't be surprised if the Taliban does more things that don't really line up with our idea of them as this repressive Sharia group.

Justin Hendrix:

Emerson, thank you very much for speaking to me about this.

Emerson Brooking:

Well thanks for having me.