Taliban weaponized Twitter: UofR research report

They issued hundreds of premature victory declarations via Twitter to amplify their messages and create a sense of inevitability.

According to a new research by University of Regina the Taliban deployed Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and most of all Twitter in the brief time it took to retake Afghanistan.

They issued hundreds of premature victory declarations via Twitter to amplify their messages and create a sense of inevitability. Their smartphones were just as handy as their rifles when they stormed Kabul on August 15, suggests the research.

Lead author Dr. Brian McQuinn said that using social media to as a tool for political gain is quite an international phenomenon.

“I think we’ve all experienced it here in Canada through the pandemic and through a number of events like the the the trucker convoy to Ottawa. How social media has really transformed the way in which small groups of people can leverage their communities and funding and their ability to actually have an impact on the sort of larger political body.”

McQuinn said that Twitter was used as the gateway to link all other social media because moderation on Twitter was basically nonexistent.

“Of the 126,000 accounts that had some engagement with the Taliban content, only 49 were ever in any way sort of moderated or curtailed. So that meant they were basically are able to open up to operate in the open and operate freely.”

He added that most efforts of moderation by social media companies are focused in North America, “87% of the money that Facebook spends on moderation is spent just in North America, and they only account for 7% of the overall user base of Facebook,” McQuinn said. “That means that largely groups working in other parts of the world have almost no moderation whatsoever, unless it’s very obvious, unless it goes viral. These companies just don’t have the resources or have chosen not to have the resources to really track this at a scale that would be have a meaningful impact.”

They report studies 63 accounts claimed by the Taliban leadership, spokespersons, and avowed members from April 1 to September 16, 2021. These accounts had more than 2 million followers on Twitter in September 2021. As of May 8, 2022, Taliban content reaches more than 3.3 million accounts.