LUBBOCK, Texas -
Propaganda being spread via social media outlets and internet chat rooms is targeting disaffected teens and young adults.
"They don't need to seize a radio station in San Bernadino or Orlando, they just have to tweet and Facebook and put up viral videos and get somebody's attention, get them into a chat room and just sorta say, hey, this is the cause, you should be joining the cause," said David Perlmutter, Dean of Media and Communication at Texas Tech. "It would be great if you could come to Syria or Iraq and fight for us, but if you can't, you can fight the battle in Orlando, in San Bernadino and in Lubbock."
Permlutter said Twitter is a popular forum for these discussions.
"Twitter has shut down hundreds of thousands of ISIS identified Twitter accounts but of course someone just opens up a new one," he said. "That doesn't mean there's a hundred thousand working staff of ISIS, it means there are hundreds of thousands of people, whether they are in Saudi Arabia or the United States who sort of support ISIS and are willing to at least are willing to pass along their stuff."
Along with using social media as a recruiting tool, ISIS has e-magazines and publications that are available in the U.S. along with videos posted to YouTube and Livelink.
"You are actually seeing through their eyes, probably the fighter is wearing a Go Pro camera on his chest or on his head and just like a first person shooter game, you're seeing a gun entering the frame from the bottom as if you're shooting and then later on you'll be seeing, they're killing actual people," he said.
Perlmutter said the production and propaganda are not produced by amateurs and they are targeting a specific audience.
"You know to convince someone to change their brand of toothpaste, on a one to 10 scale of persuasion, that would be about a two, but to convince them to come die for you, that's about an 11," he said. "So, this is how successful they are. They're able to convince, I think now upwards of a 100,000 young men and other to come die for them."
He said investigators have their hands tied when it comes to cracking down on recruiters due to the amount of information and how readily available it is.
If you have any suspicions someone is becoming radicalized, alert the police or the FBI immediately.
