Digital Propaganda: Towards a Global Rhetoric of Terrorism

This paper intends to study the emergence of a global terrorist propaganda on the Internet. We analyse what we define as a by-pass and an exploitation of the traditional Gate-keeping system by terrorist organizations. The weakening of the current “nation-states”, along with the effects of the emerging technologies, has significantly changed the management of the contemporary public spaces. We argue that the appropriation of the new media technologies has allowed a better understanding of the mass media language by these organizations and thus participates in the creation of a global rhetoric of terrorist propaganda. Using a semiotic analysis of visual contents, we analyse a corpus of propaganda documents released on the social networks by the auto-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). We show how this group develop discursive and visual strategies in order to terrorize the potential receivers and to radicalize new members.