'Taliban Twit-fight' questioned

Jun 19

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'Taliban Twit-fight' questioned

Bloggers label exchange as #PAOfail - or public affairs failure - and raise questions about who's Taliban and who's not.

Screenshot from Twitter

UPDATE: According to The Wall Street Journal, the Taliban claim the Twitter account @Abalkhi is part of the group's official communications wing. See below for blogger @ElSnarkistani's response.

The NATO International Security Assistance Force Twitter account recently engaged pro-Taliban user @ABalkhi in a social media tête-à-tête in response to tweets reporting alleged deaths in Afghanistan's Helmand province. @ABalkhi tweeted the report, to which @StewartUpton, spokesperson for the US Marine Corps, retorted:

View the story "'Taliban Twit-fight' questioned" on Storify'Taliban Twit-fight' questionedBloggers label exchange as #PAOfail - or public affairs failure - and raise questions about who's Taliban and who's not. Storified by The Stream · Tue, Jun 19 2012 13:59:18TwitterAJstreamHowever, according to Alex Strick van Linschoten, founder of AfghanWire.com, the @ABalkhi account is more Taliban fan than Taliban spokesperson. In a blog post from 2011, he provides this analysis:@ABalkhistarted: May 12, 2011 // regularity of tweets: Daily // language: English // name: Abdulqahar Balkhifollowing: 24 // followers: 4293 // number of tweets: 865This is the most well-known of the alleged ‘Taliban’ accounts, yet everything seems to suggest that @Abalkhi (and the account later created, @Abalkhii with two ‘i’s) is unofficial. He never tweets any material which isn’t already up on the Taliban’s website. He seems to speak Pashtu and/or Dari (translating material from the news section of the Pashtu site before it has been translated and uploaded on the English site). This might be (at a stretch) one reason why journalists continue to refer to his account as being ‘official’. He also tweets completely manually — presumably because he has no access to the official site’s RSS stream (which is not provided to normal users of the website). He set up his account a week after the death of bin Laden, and my hunch is that the operator of this account probably doesn’t even live in Afghanistan (or Pakistan).Politico picked up the recent Twitter exchange. Though they mention that the accounts were "pro-Taliban" and not official Taliban tweets at the beginning of the piece, Politico did not differentiate between Taliban and pro-Taliban accounts throughout the article. On Sunday, though, Twitter yet again became a field in the battle for hearts and minds in Afghanistan. In the latest flareup in an ongoing social-media campaign, coalition forces engaged the Taliban in a war of words, delivered 140 characters at a time.“By engaging them yesterday on their false claim, they were held to account for their post and forced to somehow try and validate it,” Upton said. “In the end, hopefully they lose credibility, donors, and recruits when these false posts are pointed out.”Alternatively, blogger @ElSnarkistani described the recent Twitter exchange as a public affairs gaffe by the ISAF and US military members. El Snarkistani points out that the attempt to frame the debate as a "battle for hearts and minds" is faulty. In response to a similar BBC claim made earlier this month, El Snarkistani writes:2/3 of all Afghans don't even have access to basic electricity, much less the internt. Folks who are just trying to survive and still working with oil lamps aren't terribly concerned about whether or not Facebook just bought up Instagram. El Snarkistani also highlights the lack of differentiation between Taliban and non-Taliban sources. The PAO should know who (and how) to engage on social media. Giving a non-Taliban Twitter account any more of an audience they already have by "engaging" them just illustrates how bad our intel systems really are: if you can't figure who's doing what on Twitter, what else don't you know?Despite the questions, correspondents continue to equate the pro-Taliban account with the Taliban organisation.War of tweets between ISAF and Taliban. @ISAFmedia @ABalkhiMissy RyanInteresting story on how U.S. forces are fighting with the Taliban -- on Twitter. @StewartUpton quoted. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77524.html#.T98qhG3Kv0c.twitterDan LamotheThe recent dispute echoes last year's flare-up between members of NATO and US forces and pro-Taliban tweeters, which led the US Congress to call for a ban on certain accounts, including @ABalkhi.Senators want to stop feeds which boast of insurgent attacks on Nato forces in Afghanistan and the casualties they inflict.Aides for Joe Lieberman, chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said the move was part of a wider attempt to eliminate violent Islamist extremist propaganda from the internet and social media.

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