“Upon his arrival at the State Department early last year, Lumpkin was surprised to discover that much of the department’s counter-messaging was done in English, and without the kind of data analysis needed to test whether the approaches were working. Some campaigns were little more than running Twitter battles in which moderate imams would try to challenge the extremists on theological grounds, he said.
‘You’re not going to convince die-hard jihadists,’ Lumpkin said. ‘We were not resonating with the audiences that we needed to resonate with. We needed to engage with people who haven’t yet joined ISIL. It’s how you starve them of recruits.’”
