By P.A. Sévigny
www.thesuburban.com
As the Senior Deputy Director of MIGS—Montreal’s Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies—Kyle Matthews believes that we’re already beginning to fight the Third World War and that its front lines can be easily found on the Internet.
Let’s face it,” he said. “…we’re at war, and as of now, the bad guys are winning.”
According to Matthews, western governments should recognize and understand that ISIS—the Islamic State—is already using the social media as an effective medium for all of its propaganda and recruitment efforts and research indicates that they are already getting excellent results.
As a result of his research, Matthews decided that something had to be done about the digital threat and he established the Digital Mass Atrocities Prevention Lab, an organization that he hopes will become a major presence amid the front lines of the fight against the growing threat of digital extremism.
“Terror works…at least for a little while,” said Matthews as he described a bare and vacant media landscape that’s dominated by the epic violence that has now become part of the day’s news on the Internet.
With little more than a good video camera and a working Internet connection, digital activists can take advantage of their own media vacuum in order to deliver their ‘everyone is against us’ narrative that defines the entire western world as implacable enemies of their one, true, holy and apostolic interpretation of God’s implacable will.
“ISIS is very good at using video to shock the world and getting the media to cover them (at a distance) in order to spread their message,” said Matthews. “But nobody is doing anything to produce any kind of counter-narrative that’s going to tell the truth about what’s really going on out there.”
To that end, Matthews and his staff have been developing ideas and working out a number of strategies that they plan to share with others at a Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum that’s scheduled to be held in Germany this summer.
“It’s not enough to simply meet your enemy and destroy him on the ground,” he said. “You have to destroy his ideas…the ideas that made him your enemy in the first place.”
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