Created as part of the State Department by an executive order in 2011, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) was built to "counter terrorist propaganda in interactive digital environments."

What this has meant in practice is small "digital teams" in a handful of languages posting Tweets about how much they don't like al-Qaeda. Officials are getting more ambitious with the project now, and setting it on ISIS.

According to officials familiar with the situation, the goal now is to expand CSCC so it can coordinate the entirety of "official" anti-ISIS propaganda on social media from US government agencies, foreign allies, and even sympathetic "Muslim community leaders."

Officials see ISIS and its supporters getting more and more popular on social media, and appear to believe they can duplicate this, subsequently blunting ISIS' advantage, if they only centralize the operation enough.