The social media giant became a favourite with extremists in the early years of online radicalisation; it is free, international and allows anyone to sign up and post what they please. Profiles sympathetic to Islamic State and al-Shabaab were once common on the site, but have become less visible since Twitter actively started removing extremist material.
It had been lambasted for its inaction and announced revamped efforts to combat extremism in 2015. It deleted 636,248 accounts, mostly using its in-house spam-fighting tools, between August 2015 and December 2016. A US intelligence official has previously described the site as a “gold mine” for unearthing foreign fighter networks.
With more than 1 billion users, the Facebook-owned company offers by far the most popular messaging application. Its end-to-end encryption is a headache for surveillance, including for Scotland Yard, as even WhatsApp says it cannot read people’s messages. The company has not yet responded to Theresa May’s demands to open its service to intelligence agencies but Facebook has previously fought against efforts in the US to build backdoors into their services.
Telegram
An instant-messaging service like WhatsApp, Telegram was launched by Russian brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov in 2013 and now has 100 million active users each month. The service is thought to be popular with extremists as users can host message groups for up to 5,000, talk via ultra-secure chats and even self-destruct messages. Isis has used Telegram to instruct would-be terrorists to prepare attacks and to claim credit for the Berlin market attack. The company says it deletes extremism-related activities on public channels but does not monitor private chats.
Confide
The app, an encrypted instant messaging service, first launched in 2013, claiming to give the “same level of privacy and security as the spoken word”. Its ability to delete messages immediately after being read is its key gimmick. White House staffers under Donald Trump’s administration reportedly use the software, and one GOP staffer has said he likes how difficult it is to take a screenshot on Confide. There are no public reports of extremists using Confide and it has a dedicated email address for abuse complaints.
JustPaste.it
Used by 6 million people and managed by 28-year-old Pole Mariusz Żurawek from his bedroom, the site allows people to paste in any text or image and generate a url. While nothing is encrypted, users do not register any details and remain anonymous. Jihadi groups have used it to post graphic images, propaganda and to share the home addresses and photographs of military personnel. The site claims to have removed 2,000 Isis posts in 2014 after a request from the Metropolitan police force but has defended its “no registration” policy.
iMessage
There is little evidence that extremists use Apple’s inhouse messaging service, which was set up in 2011 and is used as the default text app on all iPhones. Messages are encrypted, but it is not as sophisticated as WhatsApp, and accounts are routinely hacked. Apple, however, have been reluctant to co-operate with governments, with chief executive Tim Cook saying it would be “wrong” to “build a backdoor” for the authorities.
Signal
Signal is an instant messaging service launched by San Francisco-based Open Whisper Systems in 2014. The American Civil Liberties Union has praised it as one of the most secure end-to-end encryption messaging services and it was part-funded by US government. Edward Snowden says it is “very good” and that he uses it every day. There is no evidence that it is used by terrorists.
PlayStation App
The PlayStation Network’s instant messaging service, which can be used on a smartphone, was described by Belgian interior minister Jan Jambon as the trickiest server for anti-terror forces to decrypt. PSN’s security is not watertight, and millions of users have been hacked, but Sony is also thought to struggle to monitor its 100 million-plus accounts. New York-based Counter Extremism Project last year wrote to Sony claiming Isis were using PSN to communicate. It said Sony failed to respond. Sony has admitted that its service is open to abuse but said it urged customers to report abusive content.
