The social media site Diaspora has become the network of choice for James Foley’s Islamic State killers and terrorists looking to spread their hateful messages.
While well-established sites like Twitter have aggressively sought to suspend accounts that have been carrying gruesome footage, the decentralized, self-regulated Diaspora isn’t equipped to quickly block out bloodthirsty terrorists.
In a blog post, Diaspora admitted to the problem: “Diaspora* is a completely decentralized network which, by its nature, consists of many small servers exchanging posts and messages. 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,” the site explained.
“As many of the members of the core team are pod administrators ourselves, we know it can be hard to detect such users. We rely on our community members to use the report function to alert their podmin to any post or comment they believe to be a cause for concern.”
Diaspora managers said they hope to work with individual “pod administrators” to slowly root out tech-savvy terrorists.
“However, 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 site 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.”
Islamic State terrorists posted a sadistic video Tuesday on YouTube, showing captured American journalist Foley kneeling next to a man dressed in black.
Foley was forced to make anti-American statements before the cowardly terrorist — who spoke with a British accent — beheaded the beloved photojournalist.
