Running head: U.

S GOVERNMENT PREVENT TERRORIST WITH CENSORSHIP 1

Terrorism Impact on the media and Internet

Manuel Coronel

Arizona State University

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Abstract

This research writing project I will be giving you information about terrorist, censorship social

media and the news. How the untied state government should censor terrorist negativity

influence and how terrorist organization uses social media and news coverage to spread their

message around the world. For this writing project I will be using 15 peer reviewed articles that

been published in the past 10 years.

Keywords: Government, Terrorist, organization

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U.S Government Prevent Terrorist with Censorship

When you hear the word terrorism, what comes to your mind? People will say routine,

tragic events, my life, and world news that happens in other countries. Terrorism is a system of

terror and use of violence or threats to intimidate for political purpose. Whenever there is a

worldwide attack in the U.S, it’s brought terrorism to the national wide news and social media.

Terrorist tend to use social media and news to spread fear, to recruit, publicize itself, and to

terrify the civilians. When terrorist attacked New York in 2001 and killed thousands of people,

the main reason was to spread fear to millions of people in the world. Journals and news

companies needs to know when to cover and how to cover terrorist attacks because do you want

the world to keep living in fear? It’s important to know more about how terrorism is using new

ways to spread their fear and conduct studies to prevent terrorist from attacking in the United

States. Not only the experts should know, but the world should know how to deal with terrorist

attacks and stop letting them spread fear to civilians and change political situations. How can the

U.S government censor terrorist attacks/Marketing themselves around the world?

Terrorist organization like Islamic, Jigad Union, Tanzim Qaidat and many more are

people who uses violence and to intimidate civilians. Terrorist organization is using the news

media and social media to spread their violence attacks towards people. The media is a powerful

influence it carries messages to anyone with knowledge and skills, it leads to propaganda and

sometimes lies (Anderson 2017). The media usually has a relationship with the terrorist because

anything the terrorist do or “plans” on doing something the media are always covering to get

viewers. This helps the terrorist organization, they know the media will have to cover it and it

will spread cause the journals have the privileges and immunities conditional on it fearlessly
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speaking the truth on what happened and disseminating information to the public interest (Lim

2016). Terrorist organization knows that the media will cover their attraction, but the terrorist

knows they do not have to do something violence to spread fear or terror the news media will do

that by talking about what they have done or plan on doing. When 9/11 and The Boston

Marathon happened, it had widely spread through social media and all over the news coverages.

terrorist group doesn’t want to target a certain audience but want to spread fear or terror towards

civilians. Terrorist group doesn’t care if anyone is dead or hurt their main goal is to make sure

people know they are capable to do anything violent. According to Galily, Yarchi, Tamir, and

Azran (2016) the Boston Marathon extremely wary of any threat of terror and a big sporting

events with a large crowd that attract media attention. This attract terror international attention,

so the news must cause negative, dramatic, and unexpected issue. This is how terrorist uses the

media to spread terror and fear through people mindset. Another way, terrorist organization uses

social media to help reach their goal. social media plays a major role for terrorist organization in

this generation because provides them so many opportunities to help their organization. Terrorist

uses social media by recruiting new members, communicating with other from far distance and

operational digital action. the biggest symbol for terrorist is communication and the main way to

achieve their main purpose goal of spreading fear and violence in the world. Social media is the

easiest way to communicate with one another around the world or even in different states

(Bertram 2016). This helps them recruit new members and collaborate with other terrorist groups

that have the same goal as them. As terrorist group communicate with one another it’s less likely

for them to get detected and protect their group. This gives terrorist so much power to make a

name for themselves and make sure no one forgets about their action and what they could do.
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Social media and the media do help terrorist to spread fear and causes problems, but the U.S

government is preventing terrorist to market themselves through the media. according to Mihaela

Marcu and Balteanus Cristina, social media is taking measures against terrorist group and

prohibits the use of their service to market themselves and actions. An example of this is twitter,

twitter prohibits threats of violence against other users and in order to support illegal activities.

This helps the U.S Department of Defense in so many ways by not having terrorist spread their

message easily. In May 2016 twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Google had to signed a pledge to

abide by the European Union Code of Conduct for Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online. The

Participating parties have to protect people information, but also anything that offend or disturb

the state and sector of population (Softness 2016). This helps research intelligence gain-loss

components of online terrorist accounts and accounts to help continue law enforcement officials

to track terrorist activity to prevent anything happening. Beside social media and the news

coverage, Terrorist organization gets a lot of help from films television shows by adding their

action into movies, shows, and documentaries. It only helps the terrorist by spreading their

messages and film makers to use anything violent to make their work great. For example 9/11

movie came out last and it just reminds people what happened that day. It brings up conflict

issues like showing what terrorist are capable of doing again and a awful event that no one wants

to remember. This is how terrorist organization market themselves and gain attention from the

world.

On the other hand, people feel like their right to speak freely and express how they feel

on a topic but can’t express themselves due to censorship. Censorship is defined suppression of

any books, news, and films that are considered to unacceptable politically or threat to security.

According to Anderson, when someone lives is at skate it’s up to the journalist to releases the
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news or hold the information from the public by jeopardizing a human life (1993). There are

four major type of censorship and this is withholding information people should have the right to

know right away and not kept away from it. The other three are destroying information, using

selective information, and self-censorship. Withholding information is biggest one because the

United states government hides things from us throughout history. So why do the government

censor unpleased thing from terrorist when government censor their information. Everyone

deserve free expression the First Amendment is known for freedom of speech, the press, and the

petition knows as the freedom of expression (2018). According to Citron, it shows the retreat

from a strong commitment to free speech, explores the fallout the risk of censorship creep, and

offer safe guards to contain pressure for the good of free expression (2018). This will help people

to express themselves without due to censorship when people should have the right to say how

they feel.

Some may believe that terrorist using social media and news coverage helps prevent their

attacks around the world. However, it has been proved that while terrorist uses social media it

helps them gain more attention, spreading violence, recruit new terrorist, and communicate with

other from far distance. According to the U.S. Department of State, in the years between 2013

and 2014 there been a 35% increase in terrorism attacks across the world (Fahmy 2017). Isis has

been using social media like YouTube to attracted thousands of views to comment and reposting.

This helps terrorist organization to attracted huge audience and recruited many other Muslim to

join ISIS. Terrorist group does not only use social media to recruit it’s to create ideological

stance and spread terror. Terrorist uses twitter to post terrible imagines, send quickly messages,

and retweet post by followers. Twitter is one of the most spreading information on the plant

because one retweet could lead to thousands and millions. Social media is one of the powerful
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tools in this generation and centuries to spread any messages. The U.S government could try

their best to censor any terrorist threats, but people will keep on doing it and it will leak

anywhere on cyberspace. The internet is places where people go to see what is going on and

express themselves how they feel about things. Then again as the technology growths and

develop the government will decrease terrorist attacks and censor threats so terrorist can’t market

themselves in anyway.

In conclusion, it is cleared that social media and the news media helps terrorists to

communicate with each other. The internet and news coverage benefit terrorist organizations by

revolutionized operating methods. The benefits of social media analysis operation planning,

cyber-attacks, and simply spread fear through the internet. Terrorist organizations have many

opportunities in life with social media and new coverage as it was discussed earlier, interacting

with their audience, planning operation, and communication with far distance. All of these

advantages that terrorist have on us, we could use them too by countering their plans. As we

could see social media and the media plays a big role in this generations and help the terrorist

with more opportunities to gain publicity.

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