Review of Twitter and Jihad: The Communication Strategy of ISIS edited by Monica Maggioni and Paolo Magri

Twitter and Jihad: The Communication Strategy of ISIS is dedicated to being a resource for government officials, business executives, journalists, civil servants, and students. The book is the collective work of eight authors, edited by Monica Maggioni and Paolo Magri.The authors evaluated the videos, tweets, traditional media and other viral propaganda assets of the Islamic State, and further, argue that the whole media experts are all surprised by the whole sudden advancement of the terrorist group, self-proclaimed, Islamic State, especially in case of the modern online media, alongside territorial advancements. The authors argue that traditional terrorist groups, mostly from Al- Qaeda camp, have experienced substantial transformation in case of media and propaganda after swearing allegiance with IS. The book introduces IS modern propaganda as a result of a newly born generation of terrorism, and accordingly, draw a fine line with Al-Qaeda. The Twitter and Jihad is framed based on a Discourse Analysis of IS from a communication perspective aimed at its recruitment, accordingly, the authors tried to make connections between the traditional ways of propaganda and the modern and trendy ones, benefited by IS. The book is analytical and structured in six chapters. From the beginning, the book commences with a history of the Caliphate and then moves into the current case of the Caliphate, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and studies his centrality in whole IS system. The next two chapters consider the communication strategies of IS before and after declaring a Caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Then the authors go beyond communication styles and consider the objectives of IS propaganda, particularly in socialmedia, focusing on IS missions in Europe. Reading the book, we face severe multiple repetitions all over the chapters, seemingly the second half of the book is a hastily detailed abstract of the first half. The last chapter, exclusively on Discourse, was better if it had been covered in the previous chapters, between the lines, as it is a complete reiteration of previous chapters. It was also benefiting if the authors had provided more content about the reason European women join IS and turn into Jihadi women; the cases studied in the book are mostly men, been overgeneralized for all Jihadists, who are mostly Italian