Screenshot from the State Department propaganda video. Image: YouTube
Gloomy tunes play as low res images and video of the crucified and beheaded victims of the Islamic State in Iraq pass by, as word art translates the words of ISIS supreme leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.What you're watching isn't the troubling work of a back room ISIS operative plugging away on Adobe Premiere Pro. In fact, it appears to be the product of the US State Department's "Think Again Turn Away" campaign, the official terrorist trolling weapon for American PSYOPs confronting the increasingly stronger online jihadist networks dominating social media.
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The American government initiative has a substantive online presence on platforms like YouTube (on the account this video appears on) Twitter, Facebook, and even Tumblr.What's more shocking is the video seems to be a patchwork of Islamic State footage, tweeted out and pasted to the doldrums of the Internet by online fighters publicizing their graphic exploits—and some very familiar images to us.The State Department isn't only ripping directly from the Twitter feeds of ISIS fighters, they also took video footage from a VICE documentary about the illegal oil fields of Syria that was released in January. None of the VICE rights and clearances staff we've spoken to have a record of a State Department request for footage.See the comparison, with the State Department version first: