Hours after attack, Isis terror guides still online
AN Isis manual telling followers not to be ‘squeamish’ about slitting people’s throats was being circulated on Google and Twitter yesterday.
It took less than 30 seconds to find links to the horrific material, even though the internet companies have been warned repeatedly that their platforms are being used to recruit jihadists. Many of the links directed would-be terrorists to the same manuals that the tech firms were warned of after the Westminster attack.
The London Bridge attack also had chilling echoes of Isis instructions on how to commit an atrocity.
Photos taken at the scene showed the three suspects used a van branded with the logo of the car rental company Hertz to begin their massacre.
An Isis magazine released last month urged jihadists to use rental vehicles when mounting truck attacks.
The glossy publication, freely available via Google and Twitter despite MPs urging internet giants to remove extremist content, described how to commit a truck attack and suggested ‘pedestrian-congested streets’ as ‘ideal targets’. An issue of the magazine released in November – a month before the Berlin Christmas market attack – featured an image of a Hertz lorry in another article urging vehicle attacks.
One manual, which goes into great detail about knife attacks, tells jihadists to target ‘drunken kafir’ (nonbelievers) near places of ‘debauchery’.
The manual says: ‘Many people are often squeamish of the thought of plunging a sharp object into another person’s flesh… However, such squirms and discomforts are never an excuse for abandoning jihad.’ Google and
Twitter claim they want to remove this sort of material from their websites but when reporters searched the names of terror manuals, both immediately served up links to one guide first published in 2015, as well as numerous editions of the Isis magazine.
Chillingly in the light of that outrage, the edition of the Isis magazine published last month told supporters to target concert halls and kill children. Twitter uses technology to seek out such content and says it removed 376,890 accounts for promoting terrorism in the second half of last year. But its methods are clearly inadequate as an enormous amount still slips through. It also refuses to remove links to terror guides if published by academics.
Google, which removed the links reported to it by the Mail last night, said: ‘We...work in partnership with the Government and NGOs to tackle these challenging...problems.’
Twitter’s UK head of public policy, Nick Pickles, said: ‘Terrorist content has no place on Twitter. We continue to expand the use of technology as part of a systematic approach to removing this type of content.’