FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

News

New European Police Team Will Go After Islamic State on Social Media

Officers in different European countries will work with social media companies to identify and block accounts linked to the Islamic State, and attempt to track down the key users.
Imagen por Jerry Lampen/EPA

A new European police unit is being set up to target social media accounts used by members and supporters of the Islamic State (IS), it was announced on Monday.

A spokesperson for European police agency Europol told VICE News the new team would begin work on July 1, working with unnamed social media companies to close down accounts linked to the group within hours of them being identified.

It's estimated that about 100,000 tweets per day are sent from 45,000 to 50,000 IS-linked accounts, reported the GuardianResearch by the Brookings Institute in Washington DC last year found the best estimate for total number of overt IS supporters on Twitter was 46,000, with a maximum estimate of 90,000. An average of 7.3 tweets were sent per day by each user, to an average number of 1,004 followers, the study found.

Advertisement

The Europol team will initially be made up of 10 to 20 officers from across Europe, who will work with a range of different social media companies and in a range of different languages.

Related: 'Soon It Will Be Too Late': The Children Lost Inside the Islamic State

Rob Wainwright, Europol's director, told the Guardian that officers would not be able to go through all these accounts as there were too many of them, but it would use network analytics to identify the most active, important users. "In the end, what we are hoping to have is a strategic impact against the problem as a whole rather than just playing a simple numbers game," he said, reported Reuters.

The team will also seek to trace money used to fund IS activities. "Where you follow the money trail, it helps find who they are, what they are doing and who their associates are," Wainwright said.

Social media plays a major role in disseminating IS propaganda and getting new recruits in different parts of the world. Up to 5,000 people are now believed to have traveled from Western Europe to Syria or Iraq, many to join the Islamic State.

Alberto Fernandez, the former coordinator for the US state department's office of Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, told the BBC earlier this year: "Social media is a way for IS and for al Qaeda to be in an ungoverned space, as useful for them as parts of Syria or Somalia or Yemen."

Related: The Islamic State Might Be Losing the War, But They're Still Winning the Social Media Battle