Good to see the article in today’s NYTs, entitled “U.S. Intensifies Effort to Blunt ISIS’ Message’: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/world/middleeast/us-intensifies-effort-to-blunt-isis-message.html?_r=0 Focusing on changes afoot at the US State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterriorism Communications, there was an emphasis on building on the scale of efforts underway to respond to radical messages online, which is fully warranted. This need for greater scale along with other related issues for addressing efforts to join the conversation online and challenge the narratives and misinformation about US policy and practice in the online environment was the focus of a research paper of mine with Lina Khatib and Mike Thelwall that was published in 2012 (citation and link are below). I believe it is still relevant and maybe informative for those seeking to bolster the role of this digital outreach team, which has many strengths, such as using Arabic on Arabic Web sites, and identifying members of the outreach team by name – it is completely clear that they speak for the State Department.

Khatib, L., Dutton, W.H., Thelwall, M. (2012), ‘Public Diplomacy 2.0: A Case Study of the US Digital Outreach Team’, Middle East Journal, 66(3), Summer, pp. 453-472. A penultimate version of the paper is available online at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1734850