Increasingly, groups like Al Shabaab are using social-networking sites to reach a broader global audience. Yikes.
At the end of January, Twitter suspended
the account of the Somali-based Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group
Al-Shabaab. The account was taken offline after the group posted a video
on Twitter threatening to kill two Kenyan hostages unless the Kenyan
government met its demands. Twitter didn't comment on the account deletion, but social-media experts
reasoned that Al-Shabaab had violated Twitter's terms of service, which
prohibit direct threats of violence.
It is a pattern that has become increasingly familiar. A Facebook or
Twitter account affiliated or run by a terrorist organization is thrown
into the spotlight, activists and the media buzz about it, it is
suspended by the social network -- and then later a new account emerges.
As terrorist groups seek to reach a broader global audience, their
migration onto social networks has proven to be a challenge for the
likes of Twitter and Facebook. While governments want social networks to
clamp down on terrorist groups, Internet activists are calling for
greater transparency into social-media companies' rules and regulations.
Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy
who recently published a report on the use of social media by jihadist
groups, says if groups have their accounts deleted they will just create
new ones. "It creates a situation where it's like 'whack-a-mole,' where something
will go offline but then it will create a new account and it will stay
online for a little while, and then will be taken offline again and so
it's this cat-and-mouse-type game," Zelin said.
That's exactly what happened in December in Pakistan, when Facebook
suspended the account of the Pakistani Taliban's media branch, Umar
Media. The page was taken down because it violated Facebook's rules on
fan pages that promote terrorism. Two weeks later a new Umar Media
account had been created on Facebook, although it's unclear if it
belongs to the same group.
As private companies, Twitter and Facebook can allow anyone they like on
their platforms. But because of their vast number of global users,
Internet theorists have likened them to public spaces -- a global town
square for the digital age.
Pressure From Governments
Twitter is widely considered a leader among social networks in its
commitment to free speech, but some activists are concerned about what
they say is the platform's lack of clear policies when it comes to
dealing with extremist or terrorist organizations. "Twitter really doesn't have much of a policy related to the terrorist
organizations on their platform," Zelin says. "If somebody is inciting
someone or a group of people with violence and it's an imminent threat,
then they will take it down like they did with the Al-Shabaab account." Facebook and Twitter representatives did not answer requests for interviews.
Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on Internet censorship and a senior fellow
at the New America Foundation, explains that in addition to the sites'
terms of service -- the rules that govern user and platform behavior --
social networks are also subject to the law of the various governments
where they are operating.
When it comes to government demands, Twitter, for example, functions on a
country-by-country basis. "Hopefully what they are doing is responding
to legally binding requests. So if the government has a legally binding
order and makes it clear that the content in question is against the
law, then the service is obligated to take it down or block it,"
MacKinnon says. In October, Twitter blocked a neo-Nazi account after a request from the
German government, which argued that the account violated its laws
against hate speech.
In its first two Transparency Reports, which Twitter began releasing in
2012, the company said that there has been a steady increase in
government requests for content removal and copyright notices. In the
majority of cases, Twitter says it has not complied with the government
requests to take down the content.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a U.S.-based Internet activist
organization, has also reported on a growing number of requests by U.S.
government officials for Twitter to suspend accounts of alleged
terrorist groups. According to MacKinnon, "Facebook is less transparent about how they are
responding to government requests or what kinds of requests they are
receiving from what governments, so it's kind of difficult to know."
Tweeting in English seems to be a sure-fire way of attracting the
attention of social networks' filtering systems. Internet activists have
noticed that Facebook and Twitter are quick to react when a problematic
account is writing in English. That also means that accounts tweeting
in other languages can remain under the radar.
Sarah Kendzior, a writer and anthropologist, argues that Facebook may
not be aware of the presence of some of these terrorist groups precisely
because they are not writing in English. "I know that the Islamic Jihad Union, for example, has a Facebook page,
not with a lot of people that like it or notice it, and they publish
mainly in Uzbek," Kendzior says. Zelin also points out that Al-Shabaab's Arabic and Somali accounts were
never taken down even though they were posting more or less the same
material to their English-language feeds.
As terrorist organizations continue to embrace social media, free-speech
activists will likely become more aggressive in their calls for more
transparent policies regarding account deletions. With governments keen
to cut them off, the social-media platforms will have to make the hard
decisions of where to draw the line.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/when-terrorists-take-to-social-media/273321/
