The fight against terrorism is also being fought on the Internet. Last year, the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime (CITCO, dependent on the Secretary of State for Security) promoted the elimination of more than 3,000 web pages that contained videos, photos, text documents and profiles in which They proselytized terrorism, almost 60% of all petitions submitted in the European Union (EU), as reported this Thursday by the Ministry of the Interior. Of these, nearly 80% corresponded to radical jihadist content, although police experts highlight that content that propagates far-right ideology has increased significantly, which already represents almost 20% of the total. The contents detected of an anarchist or extreme left nature are very far away, these sources add.
Interior has organized a conference in Madrid, which began this Thursday at the Security Technology Center (CETSE), to promote international collaboration in this field and in which cybersecurity experts from 24 EU countries participate for two days. Since June 2022, the European Union has had a regulation to combat the spread of radical propaganda on the internet. Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, who opened these days, emphasized in his speech the need for “meticulous surveillance and coordinated action to protect European citizens and the rule of law also in cyberspace.”
Interior highlights that, in April 2023, Spain was the first European country to request the elimination of terrorist materials after discovering a video that proselytized jihadists in a free access digital library on the Internet. Three months later, Interior began using Perci, a computer tool designed by the European Union Agency for Police Cooperation (Europol) to accelerate the requests that states send to technology companies so that they immediately remove criminal content from their platforms and databases without the need for a court order. Until December 31, six EU countries had issued 349 of these withdrawal orders directed at various platforms such as Telegram, Meta, Justpaste.it, TikTok, among others.
Perci allowed, for example, on December 18 to coordinate with other European countries an operation that managed to detect the existence of 827 web pages that included instruction materials and manuals used by terrorists, mostly of jihadist ideology, and communicate it to these companies. so they could block them to prevent them from going viral. The vast majority of these contents were removed within a maximum period of one hour.
Police sources highlight that the invasion of Gaza by Israel after the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7 has been instrumentalized by the jihadists to increase their propaganda on the internet. It is not the only trend detected in recent months. These same sources highlight that a good part of this Islamist content is directed at the most vulnerable groups, such as minors, whom it tries to recruit on gaming platforms. on-line and on social networks. Jihadist versions of war games such as the popular Call of Duty. Data from the Elcano Royal Institute indicate that those who began their radicalization when they were not yet of legal age have gone from representing 17.1% of those convicted or deceased in Spain between 2001 and 2011, to 23.4% between 2012 and 2023. Last year, eight minors were arrested in Spain for jihadist activities.
During his speech at the beginning of the conference, Grande-Marlaska highlighted Spain’s “pioneer” role in the execution of orders to remove radical online content. “In recent years we have intensified our efforts with the creation of the National Terrorist Content Removal Unit, whose specialization facilitates and coordinates the active participation of all relevant actors to clean our network of terrorist messages and thus demonstrate our capacity to adapt and response,” he noted. The minister has also highlighted the importance of “rapid intervention” to stop the spread of radical messages.
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