SITE Intelligence Group via Riotīut just like on other platforms, ISIS was soon booted. Many journalists, academics, and terrorism researchers were even booted from the platform and unable to make new accounts, several from SITE’s staff among them.ĭecember 12 screenshot of one of the many ISIS channels on Riot, publishing the group's official media. Their many backup accounts were also removed, and when they created new ones, those were quickly removed as well. In addition to ISIS channels, Telegram was deleting the accounts of the channels’ creators and users, from supporters to top media workers. But now the platform took a scorched-earth approach. Telegrams’ past removal campaigns focused on the channels and chat groups ISIS users are on, which ISIS recovered from countless times. It’s unclear how Telegram’s removal algorithm worked, specifically, but it was far more targeted than anything the company had employed before. But the effects of ISIS’ Telegram years were far from normal, and even farther from inconsequential.Įuropol announced that it played a hand in the removals on November 21 and 22, though we at SITE noticed accounts being removed as early as November 15. Rita Katz ( is the executive director and founder of the SITE Intelligence Group, the world’s leading non-governmental counterterrorism organization specializing in tracking and analyzing the online activity of the global extremist community.Īt first glance, ISIS’ chaotic dispersal across the internet might seem like a dangerous development: If they’re no longer in one place, how will we track them? It’s an understandable supposition, especially as ISIS’ uninterrupted refuge on Telegram became sadly normalized over the years.
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