19 September 2017•Update: 20 September 2017
By Ilker Girit
ISTANBUL
More people are reading online extremist material linked to groups like Daesh in the U.K. than anywhere else in Europe, a British think-tank claimed on Tuesday.
London-based Policy Exchange's report said the U.K. is the fifth-biggest audience in the world for extremist propaganda.
Although the Daesh terror organization is losing its physical strongholds in Iraq and Syria, the group has "shown itself to be adaptable and durable" on the web, the think tank stated.
"Yet talk of ISIS’ [Daesh's] ‘decline’ in the virtual world has been grossly overstated.
"The spate of [U.K.] terrorist attacks in the first half of 2017 confirmed that jihadist radicalization is a real and present danger to the national security of the U.K. and its allies," the report added.
Policy Exchange also suggested the U.K. government take more measures against the dissemination of radical material as Daesh "is producing extremist content online at a consistent rate and this is spread across a vast information ecosystem".
The research also revealed that terrorists are contacting supporters mostly by Telegram -- an online messaging service -- and sharing materials through mainstream social media spaces such as Twitter and Facebook.
The U.K. government and France in June told Internet companies like Facebook and Google to do more to remove terrorist material.
However, the think tank argued that more "must be done to force jihadist content out of the mainstream. It is clear that the status quo is not working; it is time for a new approach."
