In November 2019, the European Union celebrated a small victory: over 26,000 items of self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS)-supporting content, as well as channels and groups, were referred from nine online service providers, thanks to an action coordinated by Europol’s European Union Internet Referral Unit (IRU). Facebook has every reason to be pleased, too. They claimed a 99.6% proactive rate on terrorist organisations in Q1 2021, which means less than 1% of this type of violating content is reported by Facebook users. However, all these positive figures may paint a distorted picture of reality: Europol’s scope only concerns official propaganda posted by designated terrorist organisations, so any unofficial radicalised content remains under the radar (Amarasingam, 2020). In the same vein, social media companies’ takedown of IS activity probably leaves aside great volumes of more general violent jihadi content that is not explicitly branded as IS propaganda and, therefore, slips through the net of content moderation much more easily (Conway, 2020). Indeed, in addition to terrorist organisations, there are also private communicators, particularly on social media, who are supporters of violent jihad but who do not explicitly express their adhesion to any extremist organisation. Such actors communicate radicalised content in the midst of regular, non-extremist posts. By sharing content that moves away from IS’ military propaganda, such Global Jihad Movements (GJM) supporters engage in the fragmentation of violent Salafist propaganda and in a more diffuse online presence. As we will see, myth and eudaimonic content are two key types of posts in this process.
TechInnovation-Social Media-Extremist Contents. How Salafi-Jihadists Circumvent Facebook’s Community Standards With Mythical and Eudaimonic Content (Catherine Bouko, GNET)
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