Never short of ways to spread extremism and sponsor terror, ISIS excelled at exploiting the Internet to advance its agenda and obtain its bloody objectives, and it has been reduced to a group of players without a playground. Once expelled from territories it temporarily conquered, ISIS resorted to different online platforms to spread its misleading propaganda, incite hatred, and recruit young people as pawns. What the group did not expect, however, is the fierce online security crackdown that chased every ISIS member, supporter, or sympathizer across the different social network pages and applications making their online activity almost impossible and reducing the terrorist organization into a group of players without a playground.
Telegram messenger recently launched an account-removal campaign against its most notorious user base: ISIS. The company’s newly found initiative was profoundly wide-reaching and effective, shaking a long-settled snow globe and scattering ISIS users across scores of different platforms. Telegrams’ past removal campaigns focused on the channels and chat groups ISIS users are on, which ISIS recovered from countless times. But now the platform took a scorched-earth approach. In addition to ISIS channels, Telegram was deleting the accounts of the channels’ creators and users, from supporters to top media workers. Their many backup accounts were also removed, and when they created new ones, those were quickly removed as well.
The campaign caught ISIS off guard, to put it lightly. ISIS members were losing contact with each other while the entire media infrastructure rapidly disintegrated. ISIS’ Telegram presence has become a pile of blocks that can’t be stacked back together, while the group scrambles across the internet to find a new home.
