As I was looking on CNN today, I noticed a recent post about the use of "Twitter" and clicked on it because I myself do have a Twitter account and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. According to this article, the terrorist group, Alshabaab, shot and killed over 61 people in the Westgate Mall in Kenya on Saturday. A few hours into the attack members of Alshabaab were tweeting updates of the attack while it was going on. One of the tweets looked like this: "The Mujahideen ('holy warriors') entered Westgate mall today at around noon and they are still inside the mall, fighting the Kenyan kuffar ('infidels') inside their own turf."
Another tweet done after the attack was this: "#Westgate: a 14-hour standoff relayed in 1400 rounds of bullets and 140 characters of vengeance and still ongoing. Good morning Kenya!" Although Twitter employees have been disabling this terrorist group's accounts for a couple years, Alshabaab keeps making new accounts and tweeting more.
Journalists have been saying that these types of terrorist attacks are like theater. The terrorists strive on viewers and attention. During 9/11 it is said that Osama Bin Laden himself listened to the live BBC coverage on the radio. Although the terrorist are not controlling the media yet, people are beginning to worry that terrorists are going to start streaming attacks live on websites like Youtube or Facebook and really start to use attacks as a form of theater or entertainment to get views and attention. This really scares me because it shows how involved technology is in people's lives today and how ideas can be spread so quickly. I think it would be really hard to limit or take away from the technology we already have but if terrorists start taking it to the next level, I think the government should be censoring technology a little bit more carefully. Thoughts and comments are appreciated!
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