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ISIS terror fanatics invade Diaspora after Twitter blockade

Nothing we can do to stop them, says decentralized network

Medieval terror bastards ISIS have moved from Twitter to non-profit social networking outfit Diaspora to spew their cant – and apparently nothing can be done to stop them.

"Diaspora is a completely decentralized network which, by its nature, consists of many small servers exchanging posts and messages," the organizers of the social network said in a statement.

"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."

Diaspora was set up in 2010 as an anonymized version of Facebook. The network stresses that users own their own content and can be anonymous, which makes it perfect for the purposes of ISIS – now the Islamic State after its rebranding. The social network uses distinct servers, called pods, which are run by administrators with no central control over what is posted.

The terrorist group, which has been making a land grab in the Middle East using the power vacuum created by the internal ructions in Syria and Iraq, has been an active user of Twitter to spread its warped interpretations of Islamic teachings.

Twitter has been playing whack-a-mole with the group, closing down accounts as soon as they were reported, and both it and other social media sites have been doing their best to stamp out the group's propaganda. These efforts have redoubled after IS beheaded journalist James Foley and released a video of the atrocity.

Diaspora said that they were doing what they could to block IS militants from using the site by asking users who spot the terrorist group's postings to inform their local pod operator, and are also doing what they can centrally.

"Because this is such a crucial issue, we have also accumulated a list of accounts related to IS fighters, which are spread over a large number of pods, and we are in the process of talking to the podmins of those pods," the network administrators said.

"So far, 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." ®

 

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