1. As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 nears, think it’s important to see how a younger generation of al-Qaeda and Islamic State supporters depict Osama bin Laden on social media. Over the past year I collected 150 screenshots doing just that. Here are some learnings, thread.
2. A younger generation of Salafi-jihadist supporters online see bin Laden as the ultimate “Sigma” male, quiet but still “Alpha.” He is still in many ways revered, and speaks to a generation that sees him as “based.” These generation z supporters were children in 2001.
3. Influenced by internet cultures and subcultures on platforms such Reddit, 4Chan and Discord, it may seem as if it’s only happening with a subset of Western kids, but it is in fact happening in MENA too, where bin Laden retains a cross-cultural “based” status.
4. In fact, videos of him greeting fighters and firing weapons, have been remixed with popular Khaleeji songs as well as chopped and screwed records. For a group of people who aren’t supposed to like music, the effect of these musical mashups speaks to a conflicted generation.
5. Now, some of these kids are on some “Muslim edgelord, I’m being provocative for the sake of it , online,” but others are firmly “Jihadpilled,” as they describe it. Like this Zoom mashup called “online classes.” Or this clearly edgelord dad joke dubbed “Osama bean Laden.”
6. There are also definitely detractors, like this Urdu conspiracy meme of bin Laden that claims “the nation calls this brother king (top line) brother who was a CIA operative since 2004 (bottom).”
7. You’ll read a lot about AQ and likely OBL over the next month, but probably not much on how he’s viewed by a very online generation. What’s clear is that bin Laden is an icon to these kids, a sigma male, whose significance still carries weight in this era of the internet.
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