Islamic State Migrates to Open-Source Social Network After Twitter and YouTube Bans

After being banned from Twitter and YouTube due to its video of James Foley's ***, the Islamic State (Isis) migrated to another social network called Diaspora Isis has several Diaspora accounts and has been posting propaganda images, videos and text to promote its murderous cause. Diaspora is a diffuse social network platform and thus has no central server. It only relies on multiple smaller servers, each of which moderates content on its respective site. Because of its being open and decentralized, taking down content in Diaspora is impossible. "This may be one of the reasons which attracted IS activists to our network," Diaspora said in a blog post. Originally, Diaspora was an alternative to Facebook that promoted itself using the slogans "Be whoever you want to be" and "Interact with whomever you choose in whatever way you want." The Diaspora team made it clear it does not want any IS content on its servers. The team gathered a list of IS-related accounts and started to talk with podmins or the persons that own and run individual pods/servers about removing accounts and posts related to Isis. However, Diaspora also acknowledges there's no fail-safe way to remove Isis content due to the platform's open-source nature. "I don't think third-party censorship is going to be very successful -- it's just going to end up being a game of whack-a-mole," said Dr Bernie Hogan, a researcher of social media and identity at the Oxford Internet Institute. The only way to fight this violent propaganda is not sharing it at all nor report it, said Hogan. He adds that it's a social responsibility that violent and contagious content doesn't spread. Aside from Diaspora, Isis used Friendica and Quitter accounts but both these sites eventually shut down Isis postings.