Official says terrorist groups are exploiting increased social isolation and online use 'to spread their propaganda through virtual platforms'
This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Monday that the COVID-19 pandemic provides new opportunities for the Islamic State extremist group, al-Qaida and their affiliates as well as neo-Nazis, white supremacists and hate groups.
Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, told the virtual meeting that a global understanding of the pandemic’s implications on counterterrorism efforts across the world is needed. “It will perhaps create an environment where more countries become weak or fail,” he said, and recruitment for terrorist organizations will quite possibly go up.
“The increase in the number of young people engaging in unsupervised Internet usage – particularly on gaming platforms – offers terrorist groups an opportunity to expose a greater number of people to their ideas, although the relationship between online activity and radicalization to violence is not fully understood,” the experts’ report said. “The reported rise in cyber crime could also lead to increased connectivity between terrorist and criminal actors.
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