Combating ISIS may be as easy as giving them ecstasy or ridiculing them into the shadow realm with advertisements for erectile dysfunction pills, according to Stephen Colbert and the hacking collective known as Anonymous respectively. The latter of the two wants to use mockery as a tool, like the Internet did when it photoshopped photos of ISIS members and turned them into ducks, by declaring Friday Dec. 11 "Official ISIS Trolling Day." Anonymous wants you to help.
In a call to action the group wrote, "We ask you to show your support and help against ISIS by joining us and trolling them. Do not think you have to be apart [sic] of Anonymous, anyone can do this and does not require any special skills." Anonymous specifically gives people directions on what they can do to mock ISIS on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. People are asked to call out any ISIS accounts on these platforms and to use hashtags ISIS uses to draw its attention. One specific directive reads: "Post photos of goats while @ing Isis members with captions talking about their wives." Anonymous has been ridiculing ISIS by photoshopping pictures of fighters and portraying them as secretly gay. Here's some of the SFW photoshops below:
According to national security analyst Ryan Mauro at the Clarion Project which tracks Muslim extremist groups these social media attacks do work. "It does frustrate their ability to communicate with each other, to recruit and everything, but they’re all moving off of Twitter," Mauro told the Daily Dot, adding that ISIS is instead opting for Ask.FM, Tumblr, and others.
Anonymous, who will also hold "real world" demonstrations on the Trolling Day explained their reason for the action:
"They thrive off of fear they hope that by their actions they can silence all of us and get us to just lay low and hide in fear. But what many forget and even they do is that there are many more people in the world against them than for them. And that is the goal of this mass uprising, on December 11th we will show them that we are not afraid,we will not just hide in our fear, we are the majority and with our strength in numbers we can make a real difference. We will mock them for the idiots they are."
