Wiesenthal Center 2015 report card: Social network’s must to more to degrade terrorists online

The Simon Wiesenthal today released its 2015 Digital Terrorism and Hate Report Card and Study at a press conference at its New York Tolerance Museum.

“Over the last year, our worst fears have become a reality. ISIS, Al Shabbab and other Al-Qaeda linked terrorist groups have tapped into the unlimited marketing potential of social networking to successfully recruit mostly young people and women in Western countries, provide online instruction to terrorist ‘lone wolves’, and spread fear around the world by ‘broadcasting’ horrific beheadings, shootings and burning hostages alive,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the leading Jewish Human Rights group, which has monitored online extremist trends for two decades.

Among its key findings, which have been put together by the Rick Eaton, the Center’s Senior Researcher and Mark Weitzman, the Center’s Director of Government Affairs, the Center found:

• Despite recent moves to remove terror postings, Twitter remains the online marketing weapon of choice of extremists of all types. There have been hundreds of thousands of Tweets that often serve as the key link in online communications and marketing of ISIS, etc.
• Online terrorist magazines continue to proliferate in multiple languages, urging lone wolf terrorist acts and legitimizing horrific beheadings, shootings and burning hostages alive.
• Facebook lead social networking companies in interdicting and removing online terror and hate material. Google/YouTube has begun to deal seriously with the abuse of their service by terrorists and bigots.VK.com, Surespot, Reddit, and Diaspora have yet to take steps to deal with the use of their services by terrorists and bigots.
• The rise in anti-Semitic violence and incidents across Europe and other countries is stoked by online haters, especially via social media. After the murders in Paris and Copenhagen, there were online celebrations.
• In just 24 hours, last July 17-18, 287,309 Turkish Twitter users sent 30,926 Turkish-language tweets in support of Hitler’s genocide against the Jews.

To access the 2015 Digital Terrorism and Hate Report, click on Http://digitalhate.net, register with your email and enter the password: digitalhate.