The designated team of people working to monitor the ISIS usage patterns of social networking platforms, have recently admitted that they can not prevent the usage of social networking to spread extremist type material and propaganda.

With advancing technology, there are ways to store data on many servers, rather than one, to minimize data transfer buffers. This is called a decentralized network and is impossible to be controlled by any single administrator. Diaspora is an example of a decentralized network, and is quite often used in unison with social networking mainframes or servers.

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After many attempts by different social networking sites to control the sharing of extremist material, it is believed that IS have switched to decentralized networks, such as Diaspora. The point of this would be to have unregulated range on what and how much extremist material reaches the masses.

Recent news articles state that members of the Islamic State (IS) have set up various accounts on Diaspora to promote or harbor extremist group actions. The creators of the particular decentralized network said that they were "concerned" about the group's activities.

Before shifting some of its focus to Diaspora, the group has utilized Twitter and other platforms; however, in the past Twitter has become pro-active in removing accounts with any IS content or affiliation. Since Twitter and these other social networking sites have upped their efforts on blocking content and accounts, it seems the groups have been migrating to free and open source software.

Diaspora's network is typically spread across several different independent servers - also known as pods - which are not controlled by the Diaspora team itself. Therefore, there is no way for Diaspora's core team of techs to influence or delete any contents from a particular independent server in the network.

Efforts have been put in to effect, to put in place and contact the administrator of individual "pods", to alert them of any issue of extremist content. This is difficult to do in its own right, however, the much more difficult part is to actually contact the owners of other smaller independent servers and have them ban the content by stressing the legal implications of such material.

In the terms of the base technology, decentralized services are virtually impossible to fully regulate. As technology grows so do the capabilities of these services, making the program much more efficient at evading detection. Also, as technology grows, so grows the inevitability of organizations like IS using this innovation for extremist purposes. 

TagsISIS, Diaspora, Social network, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria