How IS terrorists spread propaganda on Telegram

The authors write in their study published in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence that the network of bots on the Telegram platform serves to increase the influence of the Islamic State. Once set up, “social bots” act autonomously, are barely identifiable to users of the channels, and are generally associated with high potential for abuse, for example to manipulate behavior. “The use of bots has seen a shift from human-generated information to automated information – with the result that you can publish more content,” said Alrhmoun, who and his team studied the role and impact of Telegram bots in the context of IS.

“Bots are embedded in the online ecosystem of IS. However, its use is not only about publishing content, such as propaganda or information about current events. On the contrary, they ensure to a quasi-superhuman degree that the network is sustainable, grows and more people are connected. Bots keep it alive,” the scientist explained.

No creativity, no intelligence
However, social bots do not use language models for their activity. There is no creativity or intelligence behind it; they performed their actions autonomously using certain algorithms. The large language models (LLMs – Large Language Models), such as those already available in the form of ChatGPT, could make bots even more dangerous in the future, according to the data scientist. You could give them creativity, which means they can create your own content. This would allow for an “almost unrestricted spread” of terrorist and manipulative information.

According to Alrhmoun, both research results and technological developments argue for tighter regulation of the use of bots. State security agencies and social media platforms should explore how to limit the use of bots as tools by IS and other terrorist groups. There is currently a channel on Telegram called “ISIS Watch”, which publishes daily updates on banned terrorist content and enables notifications of discovered content. But this requires first identifying “terror bots”; according to Alrhmoun, questions related to transparency and traceability also arose. “At the end of the day, there’s still a lot of this kind of public content on Telegram.”

Twitter used to be central
Previous studies have mainly focused on the benefits of Twitter for the terrorist group IS. “Our investigation initially focused on Telegram and its use of bots in connection with IS,” the researcher said. For their analysis, the team collected more than 1.2 million public Telegram messages from February to September 2021 and used several variants of community detection algorithms to map a sample of the IS Telegram network and the bots within it.

The 106 bots the researchers identified through Telegram’s API were active or mentioned in 98 different groups and 37 different channels. Together they posted about 39,211 messages. The lifespan of the bots ranged from 213 days to 1 day (average 18 days). According to the researchers, bots perform three main functions within the IS Telegram community: they support the publishing and promotion of IS content, moderating discussions, and managing groups.

In ongoing studies, the data scientists are now investigating the relevance of bots to radical movements in the US and Ukraine. “What has already been shown is that the Islamic State uses bots more elegantly and robustly, as this community used and adapted Telegram for its purposes very early on,” says Alrhmoun.