Kicked Off Twitter, Islamic State Flocks to Diaspora

As Twitter shuts down access to various Islamic State fighters, members of the group are shifting their social media focus to the decentralized social network, Diaspora.

On Wednesday, Twitter started actively suspending accounts from accounts actively sharing video and graphic imagery related to the brutal beheading of American journalist James Foley. Many of those accounts were related to the Islamic State, the radical Islamist group in Iraq claiming responsibility for Foley's murder.

As Mashable's Colin Daileda and Lorenz Franceschi-Bicchierai reported last month, these radical Islamists in Iraq are using social media to spread fear and propaganda in a way no terrorist group has done before.

With Twitter cracking down on the posts and the accounts, the next step is to move to more anonymized networks.

That's where Diaspora comes in. Originally created in 2010 as a response to Facebook's privacy policies, the service differs from traditional social networks in that it's completely decentralized.

As a result, as reported by the BBC and The Telegraph, IS fighters are moving to Diaspora.

For its part, the Diaspora Foundation — the group which runs the non-profit social network — posted a blog post explaining how its service works and the challenges involved with shutting down postings from IS fighters.

diaspora* is a completely decentralized network, which, by its nature, consists of many small servers exchanging posts and messages. There is no central server, and there is therefore no way for the project's core team to manipulate or remove contents from a particular node in the network (which we call a "pod"). This may be one of the reasons which attracted IS activists to our network.
The diaspora* project team is, however, concerned about the activities of these members inside our network, because of the potential legal difficulties that hosting such material may cause individual pod administrators ("podmins")

"So far," the Diaspora project writes, "all of the larger pods have removed the IS-related accounts and posts. This includes a high-volume account on JoinDiaspora.com which was apparently used as a main distribution channel."

The decentralized nature of Diaspora is part of what makes the project work; the idea is that anyone can create their own pod (social network, in essence) and that's what ensures the network can protect the privacy of users. At the same time, however, those policies are what makes it difficult to act when inappropriate or violent material floods a pod or the general network.

Diaspora says that "each pod administrator has final say over the content hosted on their pod, and we, and our entire community of members, work to help our podmins to keep the network healthy and growing."

Losing the network effect

If there is any silver lining in the way the IS is using decentralized networks such as Diaspora, it is that these networks tend to be very small and lack the network effect that makes services such as Twitter and Instagram effective propaganda tools.

If Diaspora is able to successfully ban content from its most popular pods, the potential impact of that content on smaller pods will be even more minimal.

That said, systems such as Diaspora could serve as new places to build new social networks dedicated to pro-IS postings and propaganda.

It also shows that the IS is not afraid to move to new types of networks and technologies.