A potent tool in terrorists’ toolkit is social media: Jaishankar

New Delhi, October 29: At the UNSC counterterrorism committee on Saturday, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar urged the international community to take coordinated efforts to combat terrorism. He voiced alarm about the fact that terrorism is on the rise and that terrorists are now using social media platforms as effective weapons.

‘To tackle this threat, the UNSC has developed a significant architecture over the past 20 years that is centred on the Counter-Terrorism Sanctions Regime. This has been quite successful in alerting nations that have made terrorism a state-funded enterprise,’ Jaishankar added. Nevertheless, he continued, ‘as previous reports of the 1267 Sanctions Committee monitoring reports have noted, the threat of terrorism is only growing and expanding, notably in Asia and Africa’.

‘The use of unmanned aerial systems by terrorist organisations and organised criminal networks is a new concern for governments around the world. Being a relatively inexpensive option, misuse of these unmanned aerial platforms for these evil reasons by terrorist organisations, such as the delivery of weapons and explosives and targeted assaults, has grown increasingly easy to access ‘, Jaishankar made a comment.

‘Terrorist organisations, ideological allies, especially in open and liberal nations, and lone wolf attacks have recently improved their capabilities by getting access to technology. They assault freedom, tolerance, and progress using technology, money, and the values of open societies ‘, declared the foreign minister. He claimed that ‘Internet and social media platforms have emerged as strong tools in the arsenal of terrorist and militant groups for disseminating propaganda, radicalization, and conspiracy theories intended at destabilising societies’.

‘The technologies have also brought up new issues for governments and regulatory organisations due to their potential vulnerability for misuse by non-state actors, given the very nature of some of these technologies and the nascent regulatory environment,’ Jaishnakar added. According to EAM S Jaishankar, ‘India would make a voluntary donation of half a million dollars to the UN Trust Fund for Counter Terrorism this year to supplement the work of UNOCT in providing capacity-building support to member nations in preventing and countering the threat of terrorism’.