“Be careful, careful of communication devices.” The problems of contagion effects through social media.

May 2019

Several studies of mass shootings have shown that along with notoriety, high-profile media coverage of a killer makes so-called “contagion effects” more likely. In other words, it leads to copycat attacks. According to an interesting article of the Evening Standard, our mass media should not play continuously terrorist attacks videos, as well as show online propaganda manifestos and telling us terrorist’s life story again and again. Indeed, Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer Neil Basu said that “it’s time to have a sensible conversation about how to report terrorism in a way that doesn’t help terrorists”. Exactly in this regard, the spokesman of the Islamic State emerged from nearly six months of silence to call for retaliation over mosque attacks in New Zealand. In the final passage of his speech – which was released on the Telegram app – the spokesman offers a tip from Al-Baghdadi, suggesting he has spoken to him a message of advice from the caliph of the believers regarding communication devices: “Be careful, careful of communication devices — even if it slows down work from two days to seven days.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47645044
https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/we-must-deny-terrorists-the-media-stardom-they-so-crave-a4095566.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/world/middleeast/isis-spokesman-speech.html