When Europol announced last week that it had effectively dismantled the Islamic State’s main online network, a number of experts warned that the group would simply move to another platform.
It only took five days for ISIS to prove them right.
On November 30, an account on the unknown Russian messaging app TamTam claimed credit for the London Bridge attack in which two people were stabbed to death by 28-year-old terrorist Usman Khan. That account is linked to ISIS’s Nashir news agency.ADVERTISEMENT
TamTam is virtually unknown outside of Russia, but over the space of just a few days, thousands of accounts and channels dedicated to spreading ISIS propaganda appeared, spewing out thousands of messages in the space of a few hours.
“There was extreme activity on TamTam,” Pieter Van Ostaeyen, a member of the board of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, told VICE News. “You could go to bed being linked to 20 channels and wake up with over 1,000 notifications on TamTam.”
By Tuesday, however, TamTam had deleted hundreds of accounts flagged by ISIS watchers who raised concerns about the group’s activities on the platform. But just as before, ISIS has numerous other places to go online and as law enforcement continues to play whack-a-mole, experts fear ISIS may revive plans to build their own communications tools, making it much harder for experts to track what they are saying online.
“It is reasonable to assume that the Islamic State will resume its efforts in developing tools that can reduce the group’s dependence on social media platforms and chat apps to reach a global audience of prospective supporters,” said Michael S. Smith II, a terrorism analyst who helped U.S. government agencies track the group’s migration to Telegram in 2015.
Global News 
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