How social media is helping Islamic State to spread its poison

Isil is the first terrorist group whose members have grown up using computers, and the group has demonstrated a high level of sophistication both in the way it produces its propaganda videos and in how it expertly exploits social media networks to ensure they attract a large following.

For example, the gruesome execution videos of Western hostages such as the US journalist James Foley are carefully stage-managed, in order to capture the full horror of the crime without explicitly showing the exact moment when the captive is decapitated thereby staying within the social media guidelines that ban the dissemination of acts of extreme violence.

Isil has also proved adept at making sure its cheap, home-made videos reach the widest possible audience. One successful tactic is to hijack popular Twitter hashtags, such as those relating to the recent referendum on Scottish independence or last summers World Cup in Brazil, which enables its hateful message to reach a far wider audience than its traditional following within the radicalised Islamist community.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, renegade groups are tech-savvy (REUTERS)

Preventing Isil, as well as other criminal organisations such as paedophile rings, from exploiting the internet in this manner would be perfectly feasible if the intelligence agencies still retained the ability to track the location where the material originated. But thanks to Snowden, renegade groups are now well-acquainted with the techniques that organisations such as the NSA and GCHQ have employed in the past to identify potential terrorist cells including accessing social media websites and private emails alongside the more traditional interception of phone calls.

In the post-Snowden world, this has become immeasurably more difficult not least because the whistle-blowers revelations prompted many of the worlds leading social media companies to tighten up their security arrangements, primarily to reassure customers that their private activities were safe from the activities of intelligence-seeking eavesdroppers.

Both Apple and Google have recently changed their default settings to make encryption an opt-out rather than an opt-in feature. Moreover, the cosy relationship that existed pre-Snowden between the service providers and the spooks, which meant the agencies were given details of the access codes, is now dead: it ended the moment Snowdens revelations provoked a public outcry on both sides of the Atlantic about the alleged mass surveillance this allowed.

Subsequent attempts to heal the rift have foundered over the internet firms erroneous belief that their interests are best served by putting a higher priority on protecting their customers than on preventing acts of terrorism.

But if, as Mr Hannigan contends, these companies have become the unwitting command and control networks for groups such as Isil, it is very much in their interests to cooperate. Otherwise, when the next bomb goes off in London or New York, they could have some difficult questions to answer.

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How social media is helping Islamic State to spread its poison