The network is shutting down pages related to the Islamic State as militants try to recruit people and raise funds

Sep 15, 2014 14:42 GMT  ·  By

Social media outlets are cracking down on the ISIS accounts. After Twitter pulverized several accounts following the gruesome killing of journalist James Foley, the militants redirected their attention to other social networks.

VKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, and Diaspora are some of the outlets they chose, hoping that their policies would be more permissive, Mashable reports.

The Russian company, however, decided to take action too. With some 260 million users, ISIS was hoping that it would have a wide-enough reach to make a point, but its accounts started vanishing.

“We are shutting down all communities and personal accounts that promote ISI and have been found by our moderators or reported by users,” said VKontakte spokesperson George Lobushkin.

Up until the end of last week, there were 62 pages related to the Islamic State that had been shut down. It seems that two of the ISIS’ top accounts were included in the fall cleaning operation.

Critics say VKontakte isn't doing enough

VKontakte has been criticized prior to the decision to remove the accounts, for being the “safe haven” for the militants of ISIS. In fact, the Russian social network was their go-to place specifically because they weren’t getting kicked out all the time.

The network has rebuked the critics saying that the first account was actually taken down back on August 7, indicating that they had actually been at the task for a while now. Lobushkin did admit, however, that in the past two days, they shut down about 20 accounts of the lot.

Even so, some believe that there is still a lot more to do, since the number of blocked accounts and pages is small compared to other networks.

All profiles of official members of the Islamic Sites that appeared on a list that circulated on Twitter in recent weeks have been shut down, although it should be mentioned that there were only 16 of them. Last Friday, only seven of them had been blocked.

The issue with such accounts is that they’ll keep popping up. A new email address and a new name on the social network is all that is needed. This means that all social networks are likely working overtime to keep such pages at bay.

A Russian news site recently published an investigation into the Islamic State's activities on VKontakte, revealing just how the militants were recruiting and fundraising on the site, which is probably why the site kicked into action and started banning accounts.