BAGHDAD -- The extremist group battling the Iraqi government, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, practices a seventh-century version of fundamentalist Islam, but it has demonstrated modern sophistication when it comes to using social media.
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On Twitter, the Islamic State has hijacked World Cup hashtags, flooding unsuspecting soccer fans with its propaganda screeds. It has used Facebook as a death-threat generator; the text-sharing app JustPaste to upload book-length tirades; the app SoundCloud for jihadist music; and YouTube and Twitter for videos to terrify its enemies.
One Twitter account that purports to be linked to the group even altered a picture of Michelle Obama to boast about its capture of U.S.-made war equipment. A sign in her hands was changed from one saying "#BringBackOurGirls," referring to the worldwide campaign to save the schoolgirls abducted in Nigeria, to one saying "#BringBackOurHumvees."
The Islamic State has outfought its Syrian rivals and the Iraqi government online, as well as on the battlefield. The Iraqi government's response has been to order Internet providers in the country to block most social media sites.
What the Islamic State realized, more quickly and effectively than its rivals, was that "smartphones and social media accounts are all that is needed to instantly share material in real time with tens of thousands of jihadists," said Rita Katz, a terrorism analyst who on Friday published a study of the Islamic State and Twitter on the website of the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity online.
"ISIS, as well as its fighters and supporters, quickly adopted these tools and has been utilizing the latest Internet technologies and social media outlets to maintain massive, sophisticated online media campaigns used to promote jihad, communicate, recruit and intimidate," Katz wrote. ISIS is an acronym for the Islamic State.
Soon, the Islamic State was posting Twitter messages from the battlefield in Syria and later in Iraq. When the governments it was fighting pulled the plug on its cellphone connections, it had engineers set up mobile hot spots offering Internet access.
The group also has actively looked for ways to increase its traffic internationally, as part of its recruitment drive aimed at Europeans and Americans.
At one point, the group hijacked several Twitter hashtags related to the World Cup and fed soccer enthusiasts extremist propaganda instead of news about the current tournament in Brazil.
In one instance, the organization posted a videotape of the beheading of a policeman on Twitter, with the message: "This is our ball. It's made of skin #WorldCup."
Aside from sowing terror and winning extremist admirers, the group's use of social media has also had both strategic and tactical effects on the battlefield.
In Mosul, two weeks before the Islamic State attacked and overran the city, it began broadcasting individualized death threats on its Facebook accounts to every Iraqi journalist working in the city, according to one of those singled out. Most of them fled or stopped working.
During those weeks, the group also greatly stepped up its Twitter campaign, posting scores of videos and photographs of Iraqi soldiers being executed.
Officials at the Ministry of Communications later said they shut down social media because the campaign by the Islamic State had undermined the morale of Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, contributing to the stunning overnight collapse of two full divisions.
Many experts on extremists' online activity have complained that the social networking sites should be policing their platforms better.
"Twitter must adapt to these new circumstances and become more proactive in deterring such activity," Katz said. "It has the capability to carry out account monitoring and suspensions on much larger scales than it has thus far."
In response to inquiries about the group's Twitter presence, Nu Wexler, a Twitter spokesman, said: "We don't comment on individual accounts or suspensions. We do not proactively monitor content on the platform, but we review accounts when they're reported to us and suspend them if they violate our rules."
An official of a social networking site, who said he would speak only if his name was not used, said the size of such sites made it impossible to enforce rules against terrorists' use. "It's kind of like whack-a-mole," he said.
"We constantly look at these things, and when we find them we take them down. Our policy is any terrorist organization, we take down."
For instance, Facebook has shut down half a dozen accounts linked to the Islamic State, the official said.
The group's use of Twitter is even more pervasive than its use of Facebook, since its brevity lends itself to posts from the field. It runs Twitter campaigns in each of the provinces where it operates, and also has campaigns based on activities on the battlefield and elsewhere.
One of the group's newest Twitter hashtags trending in jihadist forums is #CalamityWillBefallUS, a response to reports that the United States is sending advisers and armed drones to Iraq.
The feed is full of praise for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, along with photos of the World Trade Center attacks, wounded U.S. troops and coffins draped in American flags.
Information for this article was contributed by Karam Shoumali, Duraid Adnan, Ayman Oghanna and staff members of The New York Times.
A Section on 06/29/2014