Archive for February 17th, 2011

Report: Jihadi groups are increasingly turning to Facebook in order to hook recruits

While the world remains engrossed in debates triggered by Wikileaks, a new threat from cyberspace is emerging. Social networking sites have now become a potential space for recruiting extremists. An excellent primer by Iftekharul Bashar, a senior terror analyst:

On January 4th, the Governor of Pakistan’s Punjab Province Salman Taseer was killed by one of his body guards, Malik Mumtaz Qadri. Qadri confessed to the murder because of Taseer’s vocal opposition to the country’s blasphemy law.

Within a few hours of this assassination, a Facebook page for the alleged killer was created. The page gathered nearly 2000 fans in an hour and hundreds of people wrote messages, praising the killer.

Although the page was removed shortly afterwards, this incident represents an emerging scenario where social networking in cyberspace could become a tool of radicalisation at a much faster pace, and with less control than through conventional websites. Read the rest of this entry »