As the world governments and security agencies are stepping up their efforts to fight online terrorism, terrorist groups are actively changing and upgrading their tactics. Social media platforms have become their open playgrounds they use to recruit fighters, to communicate between cells, and quite recently, to inspire those sympathizing with them to carry out attacks on their own.

This phenomenon motivated US Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to say in his annual State of Homeland Security address last Thursday, “We have moved from a world of terrorist-directed attacks to a world that includes the threat of terrorist-inspired attacks in which the terrorists may have never come face to face with a single member of a terrorist organization, lives among us in the homeland, and self-radicalizes, inspired by something on the Internet.”
“So what are we doing about this?” he added as reported by the Washington Post. This question, among many others, hangs in the open, in a battle of minds and technologies to contain the threat these group pose to the whole world. Social media platforms themselves are taking part in this confrontation. According to some reports, Twitter has suspended more than 125,000 accounts for promoting terrorist acts. Facebook has pledged offering free advertising to users who fight terrorism, those who are speaking out against terrorist propaganda. Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg promoted this idea while speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month. She said a group in Germany called “Laut gegen Nazis,” an anti-neo Nazi group, had attacked the Facebook page of the far-right NDP by getting members to like and post on the page, as reported by the Telegraph.
“They launched a ‘like attack’ on the Facebook page of the NPD,” she said. “Rather than scream and protest, they got 100,000 people to like the page, who did not like the page and put messages of tolerance on the page, so when you got to the page, it changed the content and what was a page filled with hatred and intolerance was then tolerance and messages of hope.”
“The best antidote to bad speech is good speech and the best antidote to hate is tolerance,” she concluded.
The US Congress has just called for new initiatives to keep closer tabs on social media to check for possible terrorist communication as reported by the US Today. And Saudi Arabia is not far behind, as its security agencies are closely monitoring and following any suspicious activities on local social media accounts.
What remains is that we all be part of this war against terrorism. whether on our Twitter timelines, Facebook feeds, or Snapchat stories, we need to remain alert.

SOURCE:   http://www.arabnews.com/science-technology/news/884946