Internet companies being misused as extremist mouthpiece, UN experts say

A UN panel that advises the security council has called for internet and social media companies to respond to the exploitation of their services by al-Qaida and other extremist groups who use the web to recruit fighters and spout “increasingly horrific propaganda”.

The panel recommended in a report circulated on Wednesday that these companies brief the security council committee monitoring sanctions against al-Qaida, its affiliates and the Islamic State group on measures they are taking to prevent such misuse, reports The Guardian.

“A worrisome trend over the past year has been the growth of high-definition digital terror: the use of propaganda, primarily by [Islamic State] and its sympathisers, to spread fear and promote their distorted ideology,” the panel of experts monitoring sanctions against extremist groups and individuals said in its report to the security council.

It said the scale of digital activity linked to ISIS, and to a lesser extent some al-Qaida affiliates, had strategic implications for how the threat from extremists would evolve in the coming years among the “diverse, dispersed … diaspora of foreign terrorist fighters”.

In recommending that internet and social media companies brief the sanctions committee, the panel said: “The scale of the digital threat linked to radicalisation, together with the need for concerted action on countering violent extremism, calls for further action by the security council”.

The internet’s impact on extremist groups is one facet highlighted in the report which covers the global threats posed by al-Qaida, its affiliates and Isis. Their actions have had an “enormous” human cost in recent months, it says, with major bombings, assassinations and exploitation of several million people in not only Iraq and Syria but also Afghanistan, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen.