US cyber-warriors battling Islamic State on Twitter

The United States has launched a social media offensive against the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, setting out to win the war of ideas by ridiculing the militants with a mixture of blunt language and sarcasm.

Diplomats and experts are the first to admit that the digital blitz being waged on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube will never be a panacea to combat the jihadists.

But U.S. officials see social media as an increasingly crucial battlefield as they aim to turn young minds in the Muslim world against groups like IS and Al-Qaeda.

For the past 18 months, U.S. officials have targeted dozens of social network accounts linked to Islamic radicals, posting comments, photos and videos and often engaging in tit-fot-tat exchanges with those which challenge America.

At the US State Department, employees at the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), created in 2011, manage an Arabic-language Twitter account set up in 2012, an English-language equivalent and a Facebook page, launched this week.

A senior U.S. State Department official described the strategy as a kind of cyber guerilla campaign. "It is not a panacea, it is not a silver bullet," the official explained. "People exaggerate, people think this is worthless or they think it a magic thing that will make the extremists surrender. It is neither one of those. It is slow, steady, daily engagement pushing back on a daily basis.        

"It is a war of thousands of skirmishes, but no big battles. America likes big battles but it is not - it is like guerilla warfare," said the official.

The murder of U.S. journalist James Foley, whose execution by Islamic State militants on August 19 was released in a video on the Internet, jolted the new...