ISIS chan WDR

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Looking for the hashtag "ISIS-chan", twitter and tumblr give you the following picture:
A young manga girl with green eyes and green-grey hair, who holds a knife in her hand with a determined look on her face to ... peel a melon.
On YouTube, the very same girl dances, half-veiled with a short skirt and long stockings, under the blue sky in the desert.
And on Pinterest, a number of ISIS-chans are sitting in Jeeps driven by masked men... with glasses of melon juice in their hands.

The manga girl that is deliberately inserted in the propaganda pictures of the self-proclaimed Islamic state is from Japan and is called "ISIS Chan".
"ISIS" stands for Islamic State, while "Chan" is the Japanese word of the German suffix "-chen", for anything cute and small like "Hänschen".
Her slogan: Knives are for cutting melon.
Knives exist for cutting melon.
And she exists for overtaking the social-media accounts and digital propaganda of ISIS.
And it is supposed to work like this:
If you're searching for tags and keywords like "ISIS" on the internet, you'll only receive harmless pictures of the cute manga girl as a result, instead of pictures of dreadful murder scenarios.
(Interview)
>> The effort to take over such things as keywords and tags could be effective on a very low level of recruitment and propaganda, when a layman tries to inform himself about the topic by choosing random keywords like "Syria". It could work, but also only if you have the big amount of people participating and knowledge about search engines.. so it's not a trivial matter. <<
  • Sandro Gaycken, expert on IT-Security and cyber war.
The green-haired ISIS-chan was most likely born at the beginning of this year, when the IS released a terror video threatening to kill two Japanese hostages. The Japanese internet community responded in a creative way:
They didn't want to have the hostages been shown as results on the internet, when you were looking for "Islamic State". Therefore, they altered the pictures and created many parodies: The heads of the hostages and the hostage-taker were swapped, or the hostage-taker's knife was replaced with a banana, for example.
But there were also many disrespectful pictures and that's why the green-haired ISIS-chan gives the digital user a set of rules that need to be kept:
Illustrations shouldn't show symbols of the Islamic religion, shouldn't disrespect/vilify/defame the Islamic religion, aren't allowed to show blood or naked skin and should be respectful towards hostages.

But who is behind ISIS-Chan?
Last autumn, the internet-group Anonymous announced that they want to wage cyberwar on ISIS to fight their propaganda on social networks:
>> Anonymous announcement plays<<
Since then, Anonymous released a list of twitter-accounts that presumably belong to ISIS and that are already hacked. Now, some of those are showing the manga girl ISIS-chan as profile pictures.
Does that mean that the members of Anonymous are behind the creative pictures?
Isis-chan responds on twitter:
>> We are mainly amateur artists from all over the world, but also anime-freaks (fans?). We're a community of more than 3000 people.<<
The twitter account is followed by more than 5000 people. But in times of fake accounts, Sandro Gaycken expresses doubts:
>> Sometimes nobody knows who is behind it and how many are behind it.. especially in a collective like Anonymous, where everybody is allowed to ... for example, it could be two or three teenagers from somewhere on the planet that decided on their own to do something, but it could also be a larger group of capable hackers, if they really want to do something like that ... or it could also be a completely different group of people who are used as pawns by Anonymous ... groups such as that are always used for secret services, mercenary forces and public relations to cover up and disguise different things ... nobody knows for sure. <<
So no one can proof who is behind it.
At any rate, the twitter account of ISIS-chan responds surprisingly quickly and detailed about its own goals:
>> To laugh off propaganda.. Our goal is to wipe out all their cruel pictures from the google results. And we also want to chance the meaning of "ISIS": "ISIS" should mean "cute character" in the future. <<
It is a digital fight about the sovereignty over the interpretation of language and images.
The IS has a specialized media unit at command, which releases Hollywood-styled movies and movies with the style of action-games to recruit young teenagers from all over the world for the jihad with the help of social networks. At the same time, the IS actively releases cruel pictures, while the rest of the internet is helpless to a large extend.
And what point is there in dealing with this with the help of a manga girl like Isis-chan?
Sandro Gaycken is skeptical:
>> The efforts of the net community to catch up... are difficult to assess, but are inefficient in general. It's rather an engagement of the west to deal with this phenomena, more like an artistic approach of dealing with this phenomena. One of the key problems is that those communities don't touch (/ get in contact) with each other: While the terrorists address the already interested groups of people, the internet-community only get through to the internet-community. <<
At least it's a try. A first attempt to not just surrender the internet to the propaganda unit of the IS. To respond to knives with melons might not be efficient, but charming.


German Origin

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  • 最終更新:2015-08-12 02:19:33

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