It's a very good idea I think to frame this issue in terms of IO. Technical woo-woo about disrupting computers aside, this is very much an issue of information dissemination.

I think it's a very good idea to remove this information whenever possible, wherever it is found. It's not that the material will somehow cease to exist, but containing it within a narrative that explains what's wrong with it is an important contextual difference. In this instance the truth is poison to these people & their process. Real knowledge is a counter-weapon to their goals. It's not that the people seeking answers and solutions to their problems are somehow overly biased against alternatives that don't involve logically deficient fantasies about death & virgins. They really are not, but if they mistakenly see that as their only alternative because it's the only one given then they will be vulnerable to the exploitation being attempted by people seeking to weaponize their vulnerabilities.

Disrupting the activities of extremists helps to marginalize both their abilities and the acceptability of their message. This is an enemy that lives to create strife, and efforts to reduce those abilities are worth taking.

I think it's a mistake to wrap online stuff up in it's own special context, these are really all just ways of communicating information. I can talk at length about making computers do bad things, but once you get past the button pushing you must look at the goals and the reasons for these things. From what I've seen, that's when you start talking about information, knowledge, and life offline.

I concur with a lot of what Mr. Simmers has said. I also don't think it's very easy to make this type of information just go away. However between chasing these people down online & offline (I consider the latter more important too), using their propaganda against them becomes important.

In a historical context it's simply ludicrous for them to expect a triumph of their bad ideas. That just doesn't happen, and at best increases in the dissemination of knowledge and information all about how broken they are can serve to accelerate their failure much better than it can be used to enable any victories.

These people are enraptured with violence, utterly stuck ideologically, & don't know what to do with themselves even when they do manage short term wins. Iran is a great example of the revolutionary immobilization that goes with jihad. Thirty years down the road from their revolution, and what do they have to show for it? Well not very much as it turns out. That's in large part because outside of blazing guns to effectively put themselves in power they're inept. This is a rather common failing of revolutionaries, jihadist or otherwise.

It's important to differentiate between making computers do bad things (that which they were not designed, or intended to do), and using them to do bad things. The former activity in many ways has the exact sort of limitations that have been noted in the conversation so far. The latter I think of as literally everything else. That because it's about the doing of other activities. When building a house, pretty rapidly you're going to get tired of talking about what drill to use, & will want to talk about the house itself. The whole `cyber' thing is like that drill, it's just a tool. Granted I may be able to unplug it from across the world, but there needs to be some reason for that before it becomes worth bothering to do. The drill is also not an end unto itself, but the house sure is. COIN cares about the house, cyber is just another power tool.