Terrorist groups, such as the Islamic State (IS), have recently increased their presence on social media. IS has focussed on decentralising its social media operations which allowed supporters to operate their own ministries of information. Popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have been used by foreign fighters in Syria to recruit their friends to join Jihad. On Twitter, IS supporters have engaged in real time discussion to organise, provoke and debate. Moreover, hashtags using ISIS propaganda have been used to hijack the trending topics.
Security experts have called for measures to combat the threat of IS on online platforms. In this regard, Europol through its European Union Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU) has been working with law enforcement authorities and online service providers to address the terrorist abuse of the internet in the framework of the EU Internet Forum. The decision to limit the space for extremist groups to recruit people online was made following a series of meetings by Europol’s European Union Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU), at its headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands.
According to a press release available on Europol website, “Between 21-22 November 2019, the 16th Referral Action Day coordinated by the European Union Internet Referral Unit took place at Europol’s headquarters in The Hague. This action was joined by a total of 9 online service providers, including Telegram, Google, Files.fm, Twitter and Instagram. This process is based on the referral by Europol of branded terrorist propaganda to online service platforms who are responsible for evaluating it to establish any potential breach of their terms of service.
Among the items referred were propaganda videos, publications, and social media accounts supporting terrorism and violent extremism. Whilst Google and Instagram deployed resilience mechanisms across their services, Telegram was the online service provider receiving most of the referral requests during this Action Day. As a result, a significant portion of key actors within the IS network on Telegram was pushed away from the platform”.
“This coordinated action focused on the dissemination of online terrorist content. Among the items referred were propaganda videos and social media accounts glorifying or supporting terrorism and violent extremism,” the agency said in a statement.
“Since July 2015, the EU IRU of Europol has been working with law enforcement authorities and online service providers to address the terrorist abuse of the internet in the framework of the EU Internet Forum,” the statement added.
In 2018 also, Europol had organised the joint Referral Action Day with the National Referral Units of Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to identify and secure the swift removal of terrorist content uploaded to Telegram services. The intensive referral campaign was hosted at Europol’s headquarters in The Hague and targeted content published by terrorist groups and terrorist sympathisers, aiming at radicalising, recruiting and propagating terrorist activities.
During the Referral Action Day, the specialised law enforcement units performed a qualitative assessment of several hundreds of pieces of suspected terrorist propaganda on Telegram services detecting patterns in how terrorist groups abuse the platform’s services.
The findings were shared with Telegram, which attended part of the event, to allow them review the detected content disseminated online by terrorist groups. The final removal of the referred material is a voluntary activity by the concerned social media platforms, taking into consideration their own terms and conditions.
This coordinated action against online terrorist propaganda focused mainly on the online production of terrorist material by the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda affiliated media outlets. Among the items referred were media files such as PDFs, video and audio uploaded by the terrorist groups to Telegram and public Telegram channels hosting this material.
As a result of the collaboration between Europol and Telegram, the already-existing content referral tools available to Telegram’s users have been strengthened and expanded. Now, any user is able to refer and classify the content they find inappropriate and violent via the referral feature in public groups and channels.
In addition, new technical developments, such as the advanced automated content detection system, continue to strengthen Telegram’s effort in obliterating extremism on the platform even further. As concluded by Telegram’s representative: “We found the Referral Action Days productive and useful. We support free speech and peaceful protest, but terrorism and propaganda of violence have no place on Telegram. We are constantly improving our internal procedures and moderation tools to ensure that our platform stays free of abuse”.
After being targeted by the Europol, The Islamic State is now reportedly seeking to increase its presence on other platforms such as Tam Tam, Tik Tok, Rocket Chat, and Riot.