ISIS social media accounts promoted use of trucks as weapons more than a month before Berlin attack

Germany calls truck rampage a terror attack, seeks answers More than a month before Monday's deadly terror attack at a Berlin Christmas market, social media sites tied to ISIS were flooded with links to an article in the group’s magazine touting “the deadly and destructive capability of the motor vehicle.” In Facebook and Twitter posts dated Nov. 11 and 12, ISIS promoted the latest edition of their propaganda magazine, Rumiyah, alongside screenshots of an article entitled “Just Terror Tactics” and hashtags like Jihad, KhalifaDE and Rumiyah4. “ISIS is a brand and they are selling their brand on social media to people who sympathize with them.” Terror groups have used the Internet to spread their message almost since the inception of the World Wide Web, but ISIS emerged as a major presence on social media shortly after the group begin seizing major swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq back in 2014. “They didn’t have to build a platform. The counterinsurgency work – which includes tactics like working with social media companies to delete ISIS accounts and pushing out counter messages on these platforms – has been deemed less effective than military strikes, at least in terms of concrete gains against the terror group. U.S. and British forces last year carried out a series of drone strikes that killed roughly a dozen members of an ISIS cell called “the Legion,” a group of computer specialists who became the megaphone for the terror group online. The FBI has arrested nearly 1,000 people in connection with the group over the last two years. “The military has really had an impact on the effectiveness of ISIS’ social media accounts,” Fidler said. “They’re going after the underlying source rather than a symptom of the problem.” Companies like Twitter and Facebook, experts say, are caught between a rock and hard place when it comes to the issue as they have voiced willingness to aid in the fight but have been less than transparent when it comes to sharing proprietary information like their algorithms. “These posts were there from Nov. 11 and 12,” Feinberg said of the Rumiyah article. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (AP2013) “Facebook has zero tolerance for terrorists, terror propaganda, or the praising of terror activity, and we work aggressively to remove such content from our platform as soon as we become aware of it,” the spokesperson said.