Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, March 29th, 2024

Promoting Taliban Propaganda

Recently a prestigious British newspaper had a report about the online effectiveness of Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. The report was about Taliban's new twitter account, being updated very regularly with news of glorifying the insurgent attacks and spreading hatred against foreign and Afghan security forces. Foreign journalists and some Afghans sharing links to Taliban's twitter account were all excited that "they are now tweeting in English."

There is nothing new in the twitter account of Taliban. But unfortunately we don't know why it is so 'interesting' for some people who are enthusiastically promoting Taliban propaganda by spreading the word out, sharing links of the tweets and source of the account. In the last two weeks, since the twitter account has been launched, some media outlets have made it a story worth writing about. With such reporting, the Taliban account has now thousands of 'followers'. Taliban is successful with the help of these media outlets who are giving unnecessary hype and promotion to Taliban propaganda unintentionally.

Twitter in its 'terms of use' has in clear words written that any account or user using violence and threats against others will not be allowed use of service. But strange is that not only groups linked to global terrorists like Al-Qaeda are using social networking tools like Facebook and twitter to promote their cause, but the Taliban twitter story being a headline in media for the past two days has yet received no attention from twitter officials. Its clear violation of its terms of use, and they should delete all such accounts that represent terror groups or promote their ideology and fear. An Afghan living in the US has said he will sue Twitter for this matter letting terror groups use the platform and violate its terms of use. We hope he will be successful in this.

We request those foreign journalists who cover Afghanistan to stop promoting Taliban propaganda by giving credibility to their lies through sharing their tweets. Comparing the Afghan Government's online effectiveness to that of Taliban is nonsense. By using twitter for spreading lies and propaganda, Taliban do not become superior online. Indeed it doesn't make a difference at all, for common Afghans, other than foreign journalists and Afghans living abroad.