Inspired Blog #4

I recently read the article that Dr. Tapia sent to use about the Taliban use Twitter. I wasn’t surprised at all that the Taliban has resorted to using Twitter as source of communication. Think about it, millions of people use the social media network and I am sure it is a very difficult talk to track specific tweets. The opening statement was “Bits of Information- not just bullets and bombs- are in the thick of fighting in Afghanistan.” Basically I think this means that not only are we fighting against weapons but also information.

                At some point the United States forces (probably the CIA) has begun to think that they were losing the informational war on terrorism against the Taliban in Afghanistan. They were able to regroup and fight back with Twitter by “using those brisk 140-character messages to get out the other side of the story.” I guess they were able to resort to twitter and track Taliban members along with other useful information to gain an upper hand in the war on terrorism. A Lieutenant Colonel had said that the Taliban has starting putting out false information, probably to mislead the United States. He said eventually they had to stop fallowing every lead they got until they knew for sure that it was true or they had resources to back it up. The Lieutenant said they now use social media to find information because it is quick and cheap. I am not exactly sure that I would use twitter or any other social media network has a reliable source of information though, couldn’t the Taliban tweet false information to mislead their followers?

                The answer is actually easy, in the case the United States Forces isn’t using Twitter to peruse the enemy. We are simply correcting their false tweets. Here is was is going on; there are several followers to a Taliban tweet group. And this group, for whatever reason, will tweet false information, like they just “shot down an American Helo.” When in fact they never did shoot down a helicopter, so this group from the United States then verifies the information and tweets back saying something like “we have no missing helicopters or reports of down helicopters. There is a group from the public affair office that monitors the Taliban tweets all day so they can respond to any false information that is tweeted.

                After reading this article part of me thinks it is a little ridiculous to pay a bunch of people to sit in a room so they can monitor and respond to false information the Taliban is tweeting. But then the other side of me thinks that the United States isn’t just monitoring this information so we can correct it, but because we can use the location of the tweets or use some of the information to track certain terrorist or wanted individuals.

                It won’t surprise me to see terrorist use social media networks more in the future now that cell phones and internet is more readily available to them. I think it would be a dumb move on their part to start using more social media networks, making it easier for the United States to fallow them and ultimately capturing them.