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130 Austrian nationals are believed to have become foreign fighters for Isis.

users consent to allowing ISIS to post to their social-media accounts. To avoid Twitter’s spam-detection algorithms, Berger noted, the app even spaces out its posts.

27,000 Twitter accounts that mentioned the ISIS positively.

40,000 tweets in a single day,

700,000 accounts discussed the terrorist group.

ISIS tries to get its content to trend globally.

using a #worldcup2014

“When an account gets shut down, a new one is immediately created, and they use other guys to promote the [new] account,” Truvé tells me. “It’s kind of a whack-a-mole thing.”

“The volume of those tweets was enough to make any search for ‘Baghdad’ on Twitter generate the image among its first results,” Berger noted, “which is certainly one means of intimidating the city’s residents.”

, propaganda has one crucial deficiency: It’s not the truth.

I don't want any government or industry to censor what I can and cannot say to my community in my attempt to ethically inform them

GREENE: Let me just make sure I understand this because it seems like a very important point - you're saying the New York Post, they are journalists; they made the decision on their own. You might say that it was a bad decision, but it was a news organization, a publisher, so to speak, making a decision about what to publish. Twitter, in the eyes of many of us, you know, is a platform for us to share. And that's a different thing for them to censor you or I or other people in terms of what we want to share or not.

Yeah, I would look at it as if the printing press operators decided that they wanted to censor the New York Post, right? That's if we view Twitter as a platform. Printing press operators wouldn't shape a newspaper

these organizations are really sophisticated with their propaganda, and this is just one video of many different types of strategies that they employ.

that by allowing this video to be available, it is helping ISIS - these militants - spread their propaganda

we were to have a technology company censoring images from the Vietnam War, think of the iconic images that would be censored and blanked.

Viewing a video, I feel like you need to make that decision. You need to make that decision. The government shouldn't make that decision for you. A tech company shouldn't make it for you.

these are the images that changed the tone, the country, the direction of that war

This one here is not the government censoring. This is a tech company that is censoring. Now, again, it's their platform. It's their rules. But it is something to be aware o

Those from the west are naive and lack imagination, they are chasing a fictional dream, and they often have barely any knowledge of what Islam is.”

The book aspiring Isis militants most commonly ordered online before taking off to Syria was Islam for Dummies, she said.

“What Isis has done, and they have exceed al-Qaida in this, is take really spectacular control of the narrative of their organisation while sharing that story through masterful use of all mechanisms of the media,” she said

propaganda and recruitment videos spreading the jihadi message w

Ten years ago, it was difficult to access and acquire videos like the beheadings we have seen unless you were part of an inner circle, but now this material is mainstream, you can access it just by opening Twitter,”

“If you are a young person with limited imagination, a limited sense of self, and you are uninclined to engage with your neighbours, friends and a pluralistic society, you are very easily seduced. You’re like a blank canvas.”

Differentiating between Islam and Islamism

Islamism promotes explicit totalitarianism and the belief that Islam historically had incredible global and geopolitical glory that should be restored through violence, jihadism and barbarity

while ISIS focuses on fighting a nearby enemy to defend the Islamic State, al-Qaida focuses on fighting an external enemy, i.e. the United States.,

e group still relies heavily on "older" platforms, like websites and forums, according to Weimann.

ecause al-Qaida is more focused on fighting Western influence, it is much more concerned with currying favor with the wider Muslim community.

ISIS glorifies violence

ISIS, all attention is good attention

ISIS's propaganda documentary Flames of War is produced in a Hollywood-esque fashion, complete with pyrotechnics and voice

appeal to a younger audience

al-Qaida's online magazine, Inspire,

al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki, which numbered over a thousand at one point before Google took them down. Al-Awlaki preaching directly into the camera for close to an hour is in stark contrast to ISIS's sophisticated and sensational production.

Weimann predicts al-Qaida will outlast ISIS. I

l-Qaida's network is much wider and more deeply rooted than that of ISIS.