photo: Eddy van Wessel

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Tuesday, April 26, 2016

The Kurds in the cyber warfare against ISIS

A friend sends you the link to a National Geographic video about the Kurdish Peshmerga fighting the Islamic State (ISIS), but when you try to watch it, you find it has been removed from YouTube.


You post a picture about Kurdish fighters who battle ISIS in Syria on Facebook, and find it gets removed. The same can happen on Twitter.


That is the fallout of the ISIS war that is not only fought on the battlefield, but also on the Internet. Because of the endless stream of propaganda ISIS is posting and its use of social media both as a recruitment tool and for communication between its members, social media companies are blocking ISIS content and accounts.


For that reason, ISIS sympathisers are hard to follow on Twitter, as their accounts get closed constantly, and ISIS movies are now mainly found through organisations following the group for research purposes and posting them on their own sites, away from the blocking policies of YouTube and others.
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