The Taliban's YouTube channel

Posted By Joshua Keating Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - 12:14 PM Share

Danger Room reports that the Taliban have finally embraced online video sharing and launched Istiqlal Media, an official YouTube channel. Terrorist media expert Evan Kohlman comments:

“The Taliban have really been latecomers to the world of online video, and their initial forays haven’t been terribly successful,” Kohlman tells Danger Room. While the group has used YouTube in an official capacity before, placing video of captured America soldier on the site, Kohlman says that the use of embedded YouTube video on their site is a first. In other words, the Taliban is actually more dinosaurish about social media than the Pentagon. Way to be Web 2.0, Mullah Omar!

So what finally pushed the Afghan insurgent group onto YouTube?  Bandwidth, Kohlman explains.

“Recent efforts to distribute high-resolution jihadi media in standard formats — RMVB, AVI, MPEG — have simply overloaded their web servers and exhausted their bandwidth.  Now, it appears that the Taliban webmasters have finally come around and recognized the merits of YouTube, using the U.S.-based service to test out directly embedding video into their sites.  By turning to YouTube, the Taliban gain a free, highly-reliable video broadcast service with the potential to reel in a vast, viral audience.”

And that's not the Taliban's only foray into Web 2.0. The "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" Website allows readers to share posts via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and other social networking services. 

The YouTube channel isn't much right now. Just a few non-narrated montages of car bombings and gun battles set to music (Judging from the soundtrack, the Taliban has also embraced auto-tuning.) But it will be interesting to see if YouTube moves to shut it down. 

EXPLORE:AFGHANISTAN, INTERNET, MEDIA, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, TERRORISM
 
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B. ELLI COSE

12:36 PM ET

October 13, 2009

Muzak?

Just a few non-narrated montages of car bombings and gun battles set to music

But I thought the brand of Islam followed by the Taliban viewed music as un-Islamic. Very odd.

 

GALLETTA6121

9:17 PM ET

October 13, 2009

These third centry fools are

These third centry fools are supposed to despise the west and its modern culture; yet they just cant get enough of the Great Satan's high tech gadgets and Japanese pick-up trucks. Who knows; if enough of these cave dwellers start getting used to all the goodies we in the west have to offer,we might just find them stock piling video games and i pods instead of AK 47's and road side Boom-baa's.

 

JVB

9:20 AM ET

October 14, 2009

Taliban YouTube

YouTube has removed all but one vid. The only thing left is a song with some beautiful scenery and images of sad children.

 

STEREOCILIA

11:46 AM ET

October 14, 2009

If you like YouTube, you'll

If you like YouTube, you'll love democracy and personal freedom. YouTube is based on our freedom of speech and expression. It would never even have been conceived in the atmosphere of fear that extremists bring.

Yet the extremists will continue to speak out the side of their faces as they denounce everything American, and then use technology invented in California to advanced their goals. If the civilians living in those countries had even a decent chance at an education, maybe it would be more obvious that extremists are full of crap. Alas, many people are under a shroud of ignorance, hiding even the simplest of contradictions

 

KARENYKARL

12:36 PM ET

October 14, 2009

One way to defeat the Taliban

is to airdrop miniature CD players with porn on them. That will bring them into the 21st Century!

 

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