TikTok, Instagram among 9 social media platforms used by Daesh in 2020

Amr Abdelmonem

A wide crackdown to tackle the online threat of Daesh and terrorist groups by Europol’s EU Internet Referral Unit (IRU) has discovered more than 26,000 pieces of terrorist content, leading to the arrest of a suspected member responsible for distributing it.

Daesh is expected to revive its lone wolves and sleeper cells to plan out terrorist operations during Christmas as it used to rely on encrypted communication methods.

Moreover, Europol has in recent months been working with some the largest online platforms, including with Google, Twitter, Instagram and Telegram, to counter the spread of Daesh propaganda operations.

On 25 and 26 April 2017, Europol’s Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU) teamed up with colleagues from Belgium, Greece, Poland, Portugal and US to identify and secure the swift removal of terrorist and violent extremism content online.

Hosted at Europol’s headquarters in The Hague, the teams jointly targeted accounts used by terrorist groups to radicalize, recruit, direct terrorist activities.

It is expected that the state of security in Europe for 2020 will not be the best, because of the threat of extremism and terrorism present inside Europe, despite the loss and retreat of extremist organizations, most notably Daesh, and the operations of lone wolves, due to the continued extremist online propaganda and false news.

Therefore, statistics and strategic studies indicate that terrorist organizations have resorted to alternative media platforms , and among the most important 10 of which are:

1- WeChat: A Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app, which maintains a privacy policy that allows terrorists to use it in place that bans other social media platforms like China.

2- Meetup: a service used to organize online groups that host in-person events for people with similar interests. Founded in 2002, the app provides ease of access for terrorist and extremists to communicate and gather.

3- Reddit: A social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website that allows terrorists to create their own community subreddits.

4- LinkedIn: A business and employment-oriented service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Extremists use this website to promote for themselves and their businesses, not to mention that it provides an extremely fast chat service.

5- Instagram: A photo and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, which extremists use to post their visual contents.

6- TikTok: A video-sharing social networking service that terrorists use to promote and spread their promotional content and visuals to share with numerous users.

7- Snapchat: A multimedia messaging app used globally, which extremists also use to directly message and communicate with up to 16 friends at once.

8- Pinterest: A social media web and mobile application company that joined the list recently as one of the websites extremists use to post their visual content.

9- Tumblr: A microblogging and social networking website that has numerous members and allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.