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Recent years have witnessed a growing body of work dealing with the ways radical organizations and terrorists1 use technology to reach their goals. Thanks to new technologies, it is not a surprise that radicals are increasingly practicing their activities in unprecedented ways. It is observed, for example, that digital technologies are being used by terrorists to create panic in society (Taylor, Fritsch & Liederbach, 2014; Amble, 2012). Such an opportunity never has been possible prior to the advent of cyberspace. Communication technologies may also be used for propaganda (Kramer, 2000, pp. 27-35; Saltman and Winter, 2014, pp. 35-40; Piwko, 2021). Online social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and the like might alternatively be applied for recruitment and gaining crowds of followers all around the world. The Dabiq magazine (ISIS’s online magazine), whose goal was to recruit jihad fighters, was published from July 5, 2014 to July 31, 2016, in total 15 issues (Piwko, 2021). Numerous studies have statistically demonstrated a continuous surge of new recruits in Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS since the beginning of the millennium. The use of online sphere as a platform for Jihad is prevalent for terrorism and has exponentially increased in the past decade (Brantly, 2017). Carter, Maher, and Neumann (2014) too, attribute this growing trend to the expansion of cyber sphere. Until December of 2015, about 30,000 fighters from at least 85 countries had joined ISIS (Benmelech and Klor, 2018). Although the majority of ISIS recruits come from Middle East and the Arab world, many foreign fighters also come from Western nations. It is argued that ISIS was the first and the most professional radical organization that used social networking sites to expand its audience through spreading its message (Kadivar, 2017; Klausen, 2015; Novenario, 2016).
Also training violence via cyber sphere constitutes a significant portion of radical groups’ agenda (Pawlak, 2015). Online document-sharing platforms have paved the way for the creation of the so-called do-it-yourself terrorism (Pawlak, 2015). Al-Qaeda was one of the first groups to create online training documents, e.g., the al-Battar magazine, which served predominantly as a virtual training camp, encouraging weapons of mass destruction and teaching explosive handling and kidnapping techniques (Cohen-Almagor, 2016). Lemieux et al. (2014) observes that a further magazine Inspire, seems to target the ‘less intellectually engaged audience’ across the world, particularly in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.