Islamism at the speed of social media

When Donald Trump talks about labeling the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, the usual reaction is to treat it as just another shot in America’s endless culture war. 

But underneath the noise is a real strategic question democracies keep dodging: what do you do about an Islamist ideology that helped incubate Hamas, that openly rejects liberal pluralism – and that now spreads faster than fascism ever did, thanks to social media and Western institutions it has learned to use?

You don’t have to buy every conspiracy theory about “infiltration” to see the problem. You just have to take the movement at its word.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al Banna. It did not begin as a vague spiritual club for disoriented Muslims. 

It was a political project from day one. The core idea is simple and total: Islam is not just a religion but a complete system for state, law, society, and individual life. Secularism and religious equality are seen as corruption, not achievements. Power should be reshaped step by step until law and society conform to their reading of sharia.

Wrapped around this is a long record of poisonous antisemitism. Brotherhood publications from the 1930s onward are full of conspiracy theories about Jews and praise for “resistance” that easily blends into outright hatred. Hamas, which openly defines itself as the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, took that mix and added rockets. 

Many Brotherhood inspired activists in the West insist they reject violence locally and speak the language of democracy and human rights. 

But the end state they describe is not a neutral, pluralist republic. It is a religiously framed order in which freedom and equality stop where their ideology begins.

That is the collision with liberal democracy. Not Islam as a faith, but Islamism as a political program.

In the Arab world, the Brotherhood built its power through mosques, schools, unions, welfare networks and – where allowed – political parties. 

In the West, the pattern is different but recognizable: early involvement in Muslim student and community organizations; building NGOs and advocacy groups that present themselves as the authentic voice of “the Muslim community”; and a steady push to define the terms of debate on Israel, “Islamophobia,” and the limits of free speech.

Now add today’s information environment. In the 1930s, the Nazis needed years of rallies, radio broadcasts, and newspapers to normalize their worldview. They had to fight for control of presses and radio stations. 

They needed street thugs to dominate public space. Today, an Islamist narrative travels on infrastructure built by American tech companies: Telegram channels pushing a constant stream of emotionally charged war footage; TikTok and Instagram clips that compress a whole ideology into 20 seconds of outrage and a slogan; WhatsApp and Signal groups where more radical material circulates away from public view.

Hamas, the clearest violent heir to Brotherhood ideology, already runs large English language channels that romanticize “resistance” and pump out slick propaganda in real time. That content does not stay in Gaza. 

It lands on Western phones, including teenagers’ phones, within minutes. You don’t need a physical mosque or a student hall to radicalize someone when their entire informational diet is curated by algorithms and private group admins.

What took the Nazis a decade to seed in a traumatized, economically broken Germany can now be pushed into the bloodstream of a relatively stable democracy in one semester.

In the United States and Europe, the danger is not that the Muslim Brotherhood will form a cabinet and declare a caliphate. 

The danger is slower and, in some ways, more insidious. It looks like this: antisemitic and anti liberal ideas are normalized in polite settings – framed as “anti Zionism,” “decolonialism,” or “protecting religious rights”; the loudest, best organized Islamist voices claim to speak for all Muslims while liberal Muslims, secular Arabs, ex Muslims and other dissenters are intimidated or pushed to the edges; and parts of the next elite generation absorb a worldview in which Jews, secular people, and the West itself are permanent villains and violence against them can always be explained away.

None of that requires a direct order from Cairo or Gaza. It requires an ideological script, a few disciplined networks in universities and NGOs, and the amplifying power of social media. 

Most American Muslims want nothing to do with this. They’re busy with work and family and trying to live in peace like everyone else. But as long as Islamist cadres are the most organized voices in the room, they will shape how “Muslim opinion” is perceived by media, academia, and politicians.

In Washington, one side wants to put the Muslim Brotherhood, as a whole, on the official terrorist list. Another side insists that doing so would criminalize ordinary Muslims and hand authoritarian regimes a blank check to crush dissent. 

Both sides are missing the deeper point. The ideology itself is a problem. A movement built on the rejection of pluralism, the subordination of law to doctrine, and a steady stream of antisemitic narratives is not just “one more voice in the debate.” Islamist supremacism is not made noble because it speaks in the name of the oppressed. It’s still supremacism.

At the same time, the Brotherhood is not a single, neatly incorporated entity. It’s a family of movements: some violent, some electoral, some focused on social work and preaching. 

A blanket terrorist designation for everything that smells like Brotherhood might feel satisfying; it would also be blunt, easy to challenge legally, and easy to abuse. More importantly, a stamp on a State Department list does nothing to solve the core issue: the spread of a corrosive worldview through institutions and networks that are formally legal.

If democracies want to avoid repeating the 1930s mistake – dismissing a radical movement until it’s too late – without declaring war on an entire religion, they need a harder, more precise playbook. 

It starts by targeting behavior, not identity: using existing laws on material support for terrorism, incitement and hate crimes aggressively and consistently. If a charity, preacher or influencer raises money for designated groups or openly glorifies violence, that is a criminal matter, whatever their faith.

They also need to map the networks properly: documenting which organizations and personalities are actually pushing Brotherhood style ideology, how they are funded, and how they link across borders. And they must invest in rival Muslim voices. 

If the only organized, funded “Muslim representation” comes from Islamist circles, then they get to define what Islam means in public. That is disastrous for Muslims who want to live freely in pluralist democracies, and disastrous for everyone who has to deal with the fallout.

Finally, democracies have to treat social media as a strategic front, not a side note. 

Extremist movements understand platforms perfectly; governments still behave as if politics happens on TV. That needs to change – through smarter regulation of algorithmic amplification and foreign influence operations, and serious investment in counter narratives and digital literacy, not cosmetic campaigns.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not omnipotent and it is not the only threat democracies face. Far right extremism, state backed disinformation, and other radical currents are also gnawing at the foundations. 

But this particular ideology has three advantages that should worry anybody who cares about the survival of free societies: it has a coherent doctrine refined over nearly a century; it has a global infrastructure of believers, sympathizers and front organizations; and it now operates in an information environment that collapses the timescale of radicalization.

In the 1930s, it took roughly ten years for a fringe movement to turn grievance into total power. Today, you can watch an amateur propaganda clip on your phone, swipe past it, and forget it – but the machinery behind that clip doesn’t forget you. It will try again. 

And again. And again. How much time democracies have to get serious about Islamist ideology – along with every other extremist project – is an open question. But one thing is certain: they have less time than they did the last time we decided that fanatics broadcasting hate were “just talking.”