.... Strictly on a practical basis, I could do this all day, every day, and there are hashtags that would have a much wider impact. I don't think that's a good idea, for any number of reasons. I've been over the conundrum of whether to allow jihadis to operate online or try to thwart them before, and my opinion remains the same -- we should disrupt them, but not indiscriminately.
There are valid intelligence benefits from allowing extremists to do their thing on the Internet, although I think this assertion has become a sacred cow among terrorism analysts in and out of government, who don't want to be bothered with the work that results when a useful source of information is terminated. I'm sympathetic to that issue, but I think it's shortsighted, especially when there are concrete advantages to smart disruptions.
That said, it's very much possible to go overboard with disruption. We need to pick our moments and pick our battles, or else we'll muck up the ecosystem, ironically allowing jihadis to hide more effectively in a noisy data set.
I was pleased to see that most of the actual tweets being trolled were in good humor and targeted terrorists directly, rather than making crude comments based on purely on race or religion. There was some such content, certainly, especially after the trollathon expanded from just my followers to the whole Internet, but it was less than I would have expected ....
