22 June 2015

IS for the day


The BBC has an article about cutting off social media from the bad guys:
A Europe-wide police team is being formed to track and block social media accounts linked to the Islamic State (IS). A recent US study found there were nearly fifty thousand accounts on Twitter linked to the militant group, many of which help to recruit new IS members. The European police agency Europol will now work with unnamed social media companies to track the accounts.
They aim to get new accounts closed down within two hours of them being set up.
Europol believes up to five thousand EU citizens, including people from the UK, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, have travelled to territories controlled by IS.
Rob Wainwright, Europol's director, told the BBC that the new team, which starts its work on 1 July 2015, "would be an effective way of combating the problem". But, he said, tracking all IS-linked social media accounts was too big a task. "We will have to combine what we see online, with our own intelligence and that which is shared with us by European police services, so we can be a bit more targeted and identify who the key user accounts are and concentrate on closing them down." 
Analysis by Dominic Casciani, BBC Home Affairs Correspondent:
Islamic State's propaganda machine is a child of the internet age; always available somewhere, always being shared by someone, always online.
IS uses "official" accounts controlled and operated from within Syria and Iraq, and a huge network of supporters and propagandists further afield. Every tweet, video, and sermon is shared and magnified in a way that is exceptionally difficult to track and stop.
Can this material be taken down? All the evidence, so far, says no. Some IS supporters dodge law enforcement deliberately, deleting their own accounts and creating new ones before police can catch up.
Some social media services don't have the capacity to respond, although critics say the biggest services are failing to at least try harder to remove extremist material.
So the question is this: if you want to stop IS online, can it be done without changing the nature of the net?
The number of IS-linked Twitter accounts could be as high as ninety thousand, according to a paper by the Brooking Institution in Washington, DC.
Aaron Zelin, an expert on jihadist groups at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says Twitter is generally used to draw in potential new recruits, not to directly hire them. The more direct recruitment conversations take place on forums such as Skype, WhatsApp, and Kik, he said.
Rita Katz, a director of the jihadi monitoring group Site, said IS militants regularly boasted online of ways in which to circumvent being blocked on social media. In an article written in April of 2015, Katz called for better security by social media firms and said simply blocking accounts was not enough. She wrote: "It's time to stop shooting in the dark, and recognize IS and its followers on Twitter are determined and dangerously adaptive; not because they enjoy tweeting, but because Twitter itself is among the most crucial tools to their growth and existence."
Rico says shouldn't it be called anti-social media in this case?

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