Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

Online marketing is the way to go. It’s how to get a following. Get people to download an app or a game to their smart phones and tablets and interact with each other, and maybe buy tokens or plays or score points. You are a force to be reckoned with.

ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), aka ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and greater Syria), had an app available on Google Play last April, May and June, described as “the app that gives you news from Syria, Iraq and the Islamic world.”

It was called “The Dawn of Glad Tidings,” or “the Dawn” for short. Once downloaded the app could post to the device owner’s Twitter account. It issued 40,000 tweets on the day ISIL captured Mosul.

There were at least 5,000 downloads of The Dawn—possibly as many as 10,000—and its numbers gave it an influence score of 4.9.

Online, Dungeons and Dragons, or Slenderman and virtual cities or farms can become real to their devotees. Avid players become persuaded by the appearance of acceptance by great numbers of others. If all those others believe what is being asserted, over and over, it must be real.

Teenagers and young adults, plugged into game communities and social media, and particularly those who have found it hard to be accepted in the face-to-face social scene, and those feeling at odds with parents or the local power structure, are susceptible to the message that those around them are wrong.

School was wrong in its teachings or standards and rules. Society is wrong. Their country is wrong.

Posting its message on Twitter as ISIL would get its Twitter account banned. But using The Dawn to post on thousands of others’ Twitter accounts enabled ISIL to get its message out there, and even to create trends because of its numbers of tweets.

We have seen the barbaric, snarling face of ISIL, seen it glory in its brutal beheadings of its hostages. How can we reconcile those images with its use of Twitter, its provision of apps made for the devices we find so essential and appealing?

ISIL has mastered the technology. It can produce entertaining videos in addition to those showing beheadings. It has learned to market itself using Facebook and Twitter and other platforms. It has become so good at recruitment far beyond Iraq, Syria and the Levant, more than one fourth of its forces inside “the caliphate” are from other countries, lured to that region to join up. Recruitment is the name of the game, and social media are how the game is played.

And if ISIL and its ilk can get young people from our western world to “go East, young man,” obviously it can use some of its recruits to carry out acts of terrorism in the West.

Some of those mostly young, mostly malcontent, young people, seething with generalized anger or yearning for some cause to give their lives (or deaths) meaning, can be induced to focus their anger on, say, the President of the United States or a court house or police barracks.

Facebook and Twitter have canceled ISIL accounts and banned it from their empires, and The Dawn was expunged from Google Play. Phones still in use and containing the Dawn probably can be used by ISIL, though.

Then there was Diaspora, which presented itself as a highly decentralized social network, collected a million or so users, who were supposed to operate their own servers. Its software was free and code was open. What could be wrong with a community-driven service supported by Software Freedom Law Center and Free Software Support Network? Other than its use by ISIL? Maybe that was enough to cause JoinDiaspora.com to close registration.

Then there’s Quitter, which was started and operated by a group claiming that they were helping its members to “quit the centralized capitalist services.” ISIL was doing land office business there at first; then its accounts closed.

Ask.fm is a site that allows users to ask questions and receive answers from other users. For a time ISIL asked questions and provided answers designed to appeal to disaffected youth, or to locate potential recruits. Ask.fm now  has Terms Of Use that sound peace loving and law abiding, and ISIL presence seems to be either slight or well disguised.

For a time ISIL used WhatsApp and KIK, but seems to have been banned. Mixlr is both an app and a website, with continued ISIL presence. Users can broadcast from desktops and mobile devices.

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Malvertising, or malicious advertisements, are a growing online threat.

We have become painfully conscious of the fact that spammers and scammers and crooks try to get us to open emails the let them gain access to our computers. They want to hijack our systems, they want to defraud us, they want to access our data and usurp our identities.

By now we have learned that the pitiful pleas of our friends and respected community members to wire money to London or wherever they have been mugged or robbed are not really from those respectable individuals. (I knew that early on, because people who actually know me would realize I am not a good source of financial help.)

We also do not believe that some widow of a deposed Nigerian official wants to share his ill-gotten fortune with us, if we will just front a fee for the fund transfer.

We know we have to have antivirus software in place, to check incoming emails for malware.

But surfing has become dangerous too, due to the planting of malvertising by third-party ad delivery networks.

Malvertising can hide and dispense malware by means of an internet-wide infrastructure tailored to certain kinds of users.

Malvertisers are hard to spot. The ad content does not persist on the host site after a user session ends.

Who is responsible for dealing with this plague? Who knows? What agency should find the perpetrators? That hasn’t clear. Site owners, publishers and advertisers are expected to fend off the threats, somehow or other. Meanwhile, we need to be wary of clicking on ads.