How viral memes did the Taliban’s work of helping them rebrand – Business Insider

You've seen them on Twitter: the videos of Taliban fighters struggling to understand how gym equipment works, enjoying a pirate ship amusement park ride, and driving dodgems and riding carousel horses.

Many of the videos have gained millions of views and thousands of sharesa testament to the oddity of seeing members of a proscribed terrorist group that have taken control of a country of 38 million people in a matter of weeks acting like buffoons.

While it's highly unlikely these videos have been deliberately seeded by the Talibanwho are more focused at present on selling themselves as compassionate, competent leaders in waiting for Afghanistanthey do help the terrorist group in their attempt to rebrand as Taliban 2.0.

"I'm minded to think back to a piece of research my colleague was involved in where they looked at ISIS magazines on Twitter," says Joe Whittaker, lecturer in cyber threats at Swansea University, whose research monitors how ISIS uses the internet. "They found the people trying to deliberately spread propaganda with the intention of radicalizing or recruiting was vastly outweighed by what you might call 'useful idiots' with a negative tagline just spraying it around social media."

The worry, says Whittaker, is that "people think they're being funny and it may have a humanizing effect."

Certainly, posts revolving around the 'Taliban are just like us' premise are viral catnip. One image of Taliban fighters eating ice cream shared on Twitter by journalist Sami Yousafzai received 8.4 million impressions in a little over a week. As one commenter noted, "sadly the posts of their war crimes didn't get 1/100th as much".

Whittaker points out that the Taliban has a difficult branding exercise to carry out entirely besides being mocked by online posters poking fun at their workout technique. "They've got to sell two very different messages to two different audiences," he says. They have to try and convince the west and anyone who may at a future point want to engage in military actions or sanctions that they are a changed group, willing to respect human rights and women's place in society. Yet to the jihadist world they're trying to sell that this is a country run under sharia law. "You see that in their messaging: they'll say things like: 'Women have a place in society', then caveat it with 'in line with sharia law'," says Whittaker.

"Clearly, being the incompetent boob or dancing to musicwhich is a no-no in a jihadist groupcan be contrary to the message they want the jihadist world to see, but could potentially be useful to what they want the west to see," he adds. While he doesn't believe they're deliberately seeding meme-ready videos and photos designed to make them look incompetent or less dangerous than they actually are, their existence online and half-life on social media does more good to them than harm by downplaying their risk to international order. And we could be helping that by prolonging its existence.

The Taliban have been the subject of memes that promote their prowess on English language social media through the Taliban Chad meme: a character who is happy living outside of western norms, owning guns, marrying multiple women and ignoring political correctness. "He's not burdened by ideals of 'Western democracy'", says Idil Galip, who studies memes at the University of Edinburgh, and runs the Meme Studies Research Network. "This is a pretty deliberate use of the Taliban."

But the co-opting of the Taliban's jubilant videos celebrating its routing of the allied forces in Afghanistan is something different, she says. "You have these videos which are shared indiscriminately, by people who are not concerned by making an intentional political point. The videos are sort of meaningless and hyperreal, terrorists eating ice cream, terrorists on a merry go-round, terrorists with funny voices."

Some of them are legitimate videos, taken in Afghanistan in the last few weeks and months. Others are categorically not: a video purporting to be Taliban fighters celebrating by dancing to music was fact-checked as a fraud. Others still have an uncertain provenance: one showing men crashing bobsleds into each other, tumbling out of the cart, hasn't been categorically proven or disproven to be legitimate.

In a way it doesn't matter. The absurdity behind the legitimate, real videos is almost unreal anyway. Which is the point, says Hussein Kesvani, author of Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims, who is studying how fringe communities communicate online at University College London. "The people who are sharing these memes and are fascinated by them grew up in the shadow of the war on terror," he says. "They can see the horrific effect of what's happened, and what's going to happen now. You've got this end of this war that defined a generation and a generation of politics, but ended catastrophically. How do you process something like that?"

The answer, Kesvani says, is humor. "Not just through humor but absurd humor. It's like processing a trauma."

There is something absurd about the peril in which Afghanistan now lies. The gym video that went viral and kickstarted the posting of such absurd videos highlights that most clearly. "It showed people who don't know how to lift, and aren't particularly strong, but could defeat the U.S. army and U.S.-trained army in record time. It was this unintended satire of what U.S. military power presented itself as being."

The videos, then, are "a way of reflecting on western imperialist hubris," says Kesvani. Yet by making the Taliban the butt of the joke, we run the risk of downplaying how much of a headache their ascendancy could cause for the future of the region, and the rest of the world. "The danger perhaps is in reframing the Taliban as these oafish group of normal guys who just happened to win unexpectedly against American military forces," he says.

Sadly, there are several historical precedents for memeifying individuals or groups to the extent that their dangers are downplayed. U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson practically designed a photocall around a zipline to become a meme in 2012. He became prime minister five years later off the back of his larger-than-life persona, and promptly delivered a no-deal Brexit and bungled the U.K.'s coronavirus response. 132,000 people have died. Donald Trump followed a similar playbook, with similar results. And in 2015, John Magufuli became president of Tanzania and the butt of East African Twitter because of his scything economic cuts. Two years on from #Whatwouldmagufulido, he turned on the country's LGBTQ community.

The outlook in Afghanistan could be equally grim as that country's new leaders become the internet's latest meme, fears Kesvani. "This is a group that has been around a very long time that has been documented for a very long time," he says. "It's like this willful ignorance of what is going to happen to that country and what is going to happen to those people."

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How viral memes did the Taliban's work of helping them rebrand - Business Insider