Britain is 'LOSING internet propaganda war' with ISIS, top US general warns

internet propaganda war with ISIS
Retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus
said: “It is clear that our counter-extremism efforts
and other initiatives to combat extremism on line have,
until now, been inadequate.
"There is no doubting the urgency of this matter. The
status quo clearly is unacceptable.”
In the foreword to a study by the Policy Exchange
think tank, he linked the spate of IS attacks on the UK
with he failure to control he terror group’s online
propaganda.
Referencing three jihadist-inspired terrorist attacks in
the UK that have claimed the lives of 35 people so far
this year he added: “The attempted bombing of an
Underground train in London last Friday - using a
device that can be built from instructions available
online - merely underscored once again the ever
present nature of this threat.”
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The report was released as Theresa May steps up
pressure on web giants to report and remove extremist
material.
The Policy Exchange report called for possession and
consumption of extremist material to be treated in law
as on a par with downloading child porn.
A survey by the think tank found that three in four
Britons favour new laws to make viewing extremist
jihadi material online illegal and want big internet
companies to be more proactive in locating and
deleting extremist content.
Co-author Dr Martyn Frampton of Queen Mary
University of London said IS is still pumping out about
100 pieces of online propaganda a week despite being
turfed out of Mosul in Iraq while its capital, Raqqa, in
Syria is virtually surrounded by the US-led Coalition.
Parsons Green terror attack,
pictures from the scene
Fri, September 15, 2017
Shocking pictures after many people have been
injured after an explosion on Tube train at Parsons
Green, London
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Victim of the Parsons Green explosion [Twitter/
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IS gets
its
message out by using “swarmcasts” - interconnected,
constantly changing networks that are hard to combat.
The report said IS uses social media such as Twitter,
Facebook and YouTube to try to recruit while it talks
to core supporters via encrypted messages on
Telegram.
And the UK is the top country in Europe for accessing
IS content on Telegram.
Dr Frampton said western Governments have focussed
on a “fruitless” policy of removing individual bits of
jihadi content from the web.
Mr Petraeus is a retired general and former CIA
director
He added: “We need to go beyond this to disrupt the
jihadists’ dissemination networks. We can only do this
if the likes of Google, Twitter and Facebook are willing
to do their bit to defend the free society that created
them.”
General Petraeus said few doubted that IS will be
defeated on the battlefield but he warned: “As in the
child’s game of whack-a-mole, when pushed down in
one place, extremist elements often pop up in another.
“They are also exploiting the vast, largely ungoverned
spaces in cyberspace, demonstrating increasing
technical expertise, sophistication in media production,
and agility in the face of various efforts to limit its
access.
“The threat posed by jihadist extremism has, in fact,
metastasised in recent years. During that time, it has
evolved into a scourge that blights the internet and
allows jihadists to reach into our societies and to tear
at the very fabric of them.”
He added: “The ‘virtual Caliphate’ is a problem that
western governments - and social media platforms and
internet service providers - must address much more
than has been the case to date.
“This domain of the fight against jihadists may well be
the longest campaign of what has been termed ‘the
long war’.”

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