Jihad intensifies its Internet campaigns to recruit minors | Spain

The battle against jihadist terrorism and its propaganda is also fought in cyberspace. The European Union Agency for Police Cooperation (Europol) He has coordinated the police from 17 countries, including Spain, to develop a wide operation (the so -called days of reference action) focused on eliminating material and social networks aimed at radicalizing minors after verifying the « growing tendency » to recruit young people through the Internet. During the same, developed between April 14 and May 27, more than 2,000 terrorist propaganda contents have been located and removed from any sign, mostly linked to jihadism. Of these, about 450 (just over 20%) were located thanks to the work of National Police, Civil Guard, Mossos d’Esquadra and Ertzaintza under the direction of the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime (Citco, under the Ministry of Interior).

A good part of this material – short videos, memes and other visual formats specifically prepared to attract young people – was housed in profiles of the most popular social networks among these, such as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube, X and Pinterest, as interior has detailed on Tuesday in a note. The European Union has, since June 2022, with a regulation to fight against the Internet of radical propaganda.

The Europol initiative occurs at a time when The arrests in Spain of young people have increased significantly for its alleged involvement in terrorist activities related to radical Islamism. In 2024, Of the 81 detainees, 32 (about 40%) were under 25 years oldaccording to a study of International Observatory for Studies on Terrorism (Oiet, organism created by the group of victims of terrorism-covite). Of these, 15 – among them a teenager who had made evidence with explosives elaborated by him – had not fulfilled the age of majority, according to interior statistics.

The coordinated action now deployed by Europol has focused on eliminating that propagan designed to emotionally exploit minors through images and videos with extremist messages, but also contained with parents already radicalized with instructions on how to educate their children in the same radical ideology. Among the retired content there are images, text and videos designed through artificial intelligence; jihadist versions of war games on-line Like the popular Call of Duty, and Videos of MMA fighting (acronym in English arts arts) on which audios overlap with speeches that justify violence.

The contents that « glorify minors involved in terrorist attacks » abound. In this case, terrorist propaganda is mainly directed towards young men, « manipulating them to join extremist groups through the promotion of heroic narratives that present them as ‘warriors’ and the ‘hope’ of society, » says Europol. On the other hand, these contents appeal much less to the girls and, when it does, it is to convince them that their roles in the jihad “are largely limited to raising and indoctrinating to future ‘fighters’ for the cause,” adds the European police agency.

Another manipulation technique used in recent years and that the recent operation has revealed again is the increase in the so -called “victimism narratives, in particular images of injured or killed children in conflict areas”, such as the current war in the Gaza Strip. « This manipulation has a double purpose: it encourages emotional identification with the victims and, at the same time, it encourages a desire for retaliation and more violence, » emphasizes Europol.

Interior highlights as « one of the most worrisome elements » of the material now located and removed is « the growing use of emotional manipulation tactics with less ideological messages and more focused on generating emotional links with users. Terrorist groups take advantage of the crisis of identity or social vulnerability and offer minors a false sense of belonging, » he adds. And emphasize that messages aimed at already radicalized parents encourage « the intergenerational transmission of extremist ideology » and, therefore, have « a potentially lasting psychological impact » on minors.

In April 2023, Spain became the first European country to request the elimination of terrorist materials after discovering a video that made jihadist proselytism in a free access digital library on the network. Three months later, Interior began using Percia computer tool designed by Europol to accelerate the requests that the states send to the technological companies so that they immediately withdraw the criminal content of their platforms and databases without the need for a court order.

Perciwhich is one of the instruments that has been used in this last campaign, allowed in December 2023 to coordinate with other European countries an operation similar to the known now that it then managed to detect the existence of 827 web pages that included instructional materials and manuals used by terrorists, mostly of jihadist ideologyand tell these companies to block them to prevent them from becoming viral. The vast majority of these contents were removed within an hour.