U.S. Calls Out Islamic State on Use of Porn in Recruitment Tweet

TERRORVILLE—A little known State Department program called “Think Again Turn Away” has been trolling the Islamic State terror group ISIL on Twitter and other social media in order to undermine the terror group's propaganda and recruitment campaigns by directly confronting them in front of the very young people they are trying to recruit. In a post on mic.com this afternoon, Matt Connolly noticed that the “Think Again Turn Away” Twitter account had responded this morning to a tweet sent yesterday from the State of Islam’s Twitter account that contained three photos of alleged atrocities, and the message, “Islamic State is the SOLE SAVIOUR of millions of Sunni [Muslims] against Iraqi-Syria Army butchers.” Someone at State obviously noticed that one of the photos depicted something other than what ISIL said it did, because State tweeted at about 7:30 this morning, “The middle photo is taken from Hungarian porn. Stop using fake photos to ‘trick’ people into supporting your lost cause.” The photo in question shows what looks to be a woman surrounded by men in uniform forcing her to sodomize them. We’re not posting it here, but Connolly’s story has a link to it. About the trolling program, Connolly adds that it is “a product of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, created in 2010 as a way to reach potential terrorists online on foreign language forums, expanding to English sites and on social media over the past year.” He doesn’t seem to think it’s succeeding in showing the terrorists “the error of their ways,” but as mentioned, the real intent of the government could be to influence any potential sympathizers listening in by making sure that ISIL’s absurd claims are always challenged. The story also suggests that maybe all that porn watching by government bureaucrats is not a waste of time, but maybe a patriotic act by loyal Americans committing to memory terabits of porn for times like this; and maybe just maybe, the politicians crowing about new laws to outlaw porn watching by federal employees should instead chip in with the workload and start watching some porn themselves—unless of course they’d rather not and help the terrorists!