Countering spectacles of fear: Anonymous’ meme ‘war’ against ISIS

Abstract

In recent years, the terrorist network Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has generated what might be referred to as a ‘spectacle of fear’ through strategic dissemination of execution videos and other graphic material. In response, social media users, activists and others circulate ‘counter-spectacles’, attempting to circumvent Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s spectacle of fear. An important case in point is the global hacking network Anonymous declaring ‘war’ against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, including a global call for a ‘Troll ISIS Day’. This article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the spectacle of fear generated by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and the counter-spectacle created through Anonymous’ trolling practices and explores empirically how Anonymous uses humor to combat fear through the memes produced on ‘Troll ISIS Day’. Bottom-up, cultural forms such as memes are increasingly woven into strategies for countering the fear associated with terrorism, and they represent the potential for humor to generate public engagement. However, as these memetic counter-spectacles draw on the incongruent humor characteristic of meme culture, they both contest and adopt strategies of fear, pointing to ethical challenges inherent in the counter-spectacle.

Remixing war: An analysis of the reimagination of the Russian–Ukraine war on TikTok

“…In today's digitally networked world, witnessing and providing testimony to events such as armed conflicts is no longer exclusively tied to editorial decisions and newsroom resources. While the scholarly work on war and conflict on social media still largely focuses on news media and institutions and their use of platforms (Wall, 2010;Cowart et al, 2016;Parry, 2018;Crilley and Chatterje-Doody, 2020;Dhanesh and Rahman, 2021;McCrow-Young and Mortensen, 2021;Hedling et al, 2022), analyses of user-generated content have become increasingly prevalent (Andén-Papadopoulos, 2009Al-Ghazzi, 2014;Makhortykh and Sydorova, 2017).…”

Folk Models of Misinformation on Social Media

“…For example, the #OpIsis operation, in which lists of tens of thousands of Twitter accounts that purportedly belonged to members of ISIS or its sympathizers were leaked, was launched in response to the terrorist attacks in France in 2015 [77]. Here, in addition to the leaks, hacktivists also waged a meme war and called for a "Troll ISIS Day" to provoke and disrupt ISIS-supported social media [76]. The Anonymous group in early 2022 took on Twitter to declare a "cyber war" to Russia in response to the Ukrainian invasion, launching DoS attacks against Russian's Federal Security Service's website and hacking Russian streaming services to broadcast war videos from Ukraine [104].…”

“…Trolling initially came in textual format as comments to posts, bulletin boards, and websites "deindividualized" people's lived experience for the "lulz" [12]. Gradually, hacktivists popularized a multimedia format of trolling or "memes," where textual commentary is superimposed over well-known imagery, typically representing different forms of power, such as political leaders, the police, and celebrities [76]. Memes, perhaps, were the actual rite of passage to true hacktivism -moving away from the early LOLCats -as they seek to deconstruct the power represented, contest censorship, and provide political commentary [87].…”

Peace strategies and approaches for resolving the conflict of terrorism in Indonesia

“…Indonesia, as one of the countries with the most decisive influence of terrorism, of course, must pay great attention to the development of radicalism and terrorism networks because terrorism is a transnational and organized crime with clandestine characteristics, that this crime is also supported by the utilization of modern technology in the field of communication, informatics, transportation, and modern weapons, so it is not surprising that in some countries new cells have been born which become embryos for the development of terrorism networks themselves (Coman et al 2021;Downing 2021;McCrow-Young and Mortensen 2021;Murthy 2021;Näsi et al 2021;Rauf 2021;Debrael et al 2021;Solheim 2021) One of the highlights is that in 2016 there were 170 cases of terrorism which rose dramatically (Rustam 2017). The Indonesian people's lives today face serious threats related to the hardening of conflicts in Society, both vertically and horizontally.…”