How Does Social Media Affect The Growth Of Terrorism

I think that the coverage by the media only serves to encourage terrorists to continue to act and conduct larger more spectacular attacks. The larger and more destructive or violent the event, the more coverage the story will get, thus increasing the exposure of the terrorist group or individual terrorist. The problem is that many media site attempt to sensationalize the event in order to boost rating and keep people watching the events unfold. This can be seen in a study conducted Dr. Hamblen, who noticed that large-scale attacks that maintained a high level of media coverage drew larger crowds of viewers for elongated periods of time. During the September 11th attack, the average adult viewed 8 hours of media coverage 3-5 days after the attack occurred. It was reported that
children also viewed almost 3 hours of media coverage and in both instances, those who watched the most coverage were reported to have more stress symptoms than those who watched less coverage (Hamblen, n.d.). All of this coverage, weather intentional or not, only boosted the moral and confidence of those who conducted the attacks and those associated with the group. This also increases the likelihood of potential financial investors to continue to provide funding or increase funding based on the success of their attacks and the media coverage it garnered.
I have seen this time and time again in Afghanistan where a terrorist attack would occur and then the group would attempt to over exaggerate the successfulness of their attack on their social media sites. The more successful or active a group was, the better funded and more well-armed they tended to be. As far as negative media coverage hurting the growth of terrorism, I think that is unlikely. I think that if a media group simply stated that a terrorist attack occurred and nothing more, I would cause more damage to a terrorist group than anything else. The Huffington Post actually believes that it is media’s attempt to identify and publicize attacks that encourage terrorists to continue to act. In the article it suggests that the media encourages groups by publicizing claims of responsibility, thus giving a terrorist group credit for the attack. It suggests that media should never report on who conducted the attack and that the concept of responsibility exists in a different dimension than
terrorism. Media also often take single source reporting for who is to blame for the attack without attempting to corroborate any of the facts against this claim. This sometimes leads to giving credit to the wrong terrorist organization. Horgan also indicates that the media’s ability to personalize and dramatize the actions of terrorists provides an inaccurate perception of what is and is not terrorism.