A small army of pro-terrorism accounts has polluted Facebook with dangerous propaganda
On August 10, 2019, a woman on Facebook posted a status warning her contacts not to accept friend requests from her sister Charlotte, whose account had been hacked She shared a screenshot of the account: an image of a blonde-haired boy dressed in desert camouflage and gripping a pistol with both his hands stared out from the screen. The image was captioned, in Arabic, “Luqmen Ben Tachafin. He does not tire. He does not bore”. Over the coming months, the account went silent, and the incident became just another story of social media hacking. That changed in March 2020, when Facebook accounts whose bios read “Luqmen Ben Tachafin. I shake your throne and destroy your dreams. Never tired, never bored, until the Judgement Day” began sharing Isis content across the platform. In a span of 87 days, 90 of them would appear – all with the same signature images and bios. Luqmen, the “destroyer of dreams”.
The accounts, were part of a small army of Isis supporters on Facebook who called themselves the Fuouaris Upload network – after Fuorusiyya, the practice of equestrian fighting popular in 14th Century Islam. I first came across the Fuouaris Upload network by following a daily smattering of pro-Isis Twitter accounts flooding hashtags trending in Saudi Arabia with videos of beheadings, photographs of attacks, and links to cloud-based storage drives containing thousands of pieces of terrorist propaganda. For the past ten months, following the killing of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, Isis’s leader and chief ideologue, these Twitter accounts, exhibiting bot-like behaviour, have appeared day in and day out in an attempt to make Isis content trend on the platform. The Twitter accounts rarely survive more than a day before being taken down.
A little past midnight on April 7, one of those accounts shared links to a Facebook Watch Party hosted by an account going by Miro Williams. The Watch Party – a feature enabling Facebook users to watch videos in real time with friends – featured an Isis video titled “The Grit of War – The Bloodshed of Mosul”, and linked to multiple other Isis accounts spread out across the social network. One of those accounts was Luqmen Ben Tachafin.
That account was at the centre of a network using new tactics to share terrorist content on Facebook, where it was viewed by tens of thousands of people. Despite Facebook saying that “99 percent of terrorist content” is removed before it is flagged by other users, Fuouaris Upload uses unsophisticated but effective methods to elude moderation and pollute the social network with terrorist propaganda