On August 19, 2014, a YouTube account claiming to belong to a member of the jihadist group calling itself the Islamic State uploaded a video portraying the brutal beheading of missing American journalist, James Wright Foley. YouTube reacted quickly and took the video down, but by then the video had already spread across the internet and the amount of people that had viewed the video had only grown exponentially as copies of the video circulated the internet. Before long, millions of Americans were glued to their screens in horror as they watched the diabolical decapitation of one of their own. By midday, most Americans had heard the news as headlines such as “American journalist beheaded by ISIS” ran across screens around the world and keywords such as ‘foley,’ ‘beheading,’ and ‘ISIS’ skyrocketed to the top of search engines. By the end of the day, one pervasive question remained on the minds of many Americans: What is ISIS?
In a way,