Europol establishes web unit to shut down ISIS social media activity
New unit aims to weaken ISIS social media recruitment channels
Europol is to establish a Europe-wide unit with the aim of searching for and removing ISIS social media accounts used to recruit new members to Islamic State.
The law enforcement agency will be working with social media companies to find and shut down the estimated 50,000 accounts used by key figures to send what is estimated to be over 100,000 Tweets a day.
Europol will formally begin work on July 1 and has set the target of closing down ISIS accounts within two hours of them being set up in order to prevent recruitment of new fighters and jihadi brides.
Europol director Rob Wainwright told the BBC that the newly established team "would be an effective way of combating the problem", but warned that it will be far from an easy task, given the decentralised model of ISIS social media accounts.
"We will have to combine what we see online, with our own intelligence and that that is shared with us by European police services, so we can be a bit more targeted and identify who the key user accounts are... and concentrate on closing them down," he said.
Europol hasn't named which social media firms it will work with, but the body will be using analytical tools to identify the most active accounts, such as those posting the most messages or those posted on prominent forums. Experts believe that Facebook, Twitter and Skype are common means of recruitment.
Hannigan said Islamic State was "exploiting the power of the web to create a jihadi threat with near-global reach".
He went on to add that technology companies have "become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals", and this is a fact, "however much [technology companies] may dislike it".