90% of terrorist plans involve Web: expert

Cyber terrorism should be tackled with international cooperation: minister

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Friday that the Internet has helped facilitate a rapid increase in terrorist activities in recent years, adding that international society should collaborate to fight the spread of extremism online.

Terrorist organizations have taken advantage of the Internet to expand the reach of their violent and extreme ideologies, which has become one of the most tricky challenges facing the world’s safety, Wang said at the opening ceremony of an anti-terrorism conference held in Beijing.

The conference, organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is part of the annual agenda of the Global Coun- terterrorism Forum (GCTF), with more than 180 officials and scholars from the GCTF members around the world attending the meeting.

More than 90 percent of the world’s terrorist activities either are organized online or use the Internet for publicity, Zhang Jiadong, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, told the press after the meeting.

Terrorist recruitment and training, as well as the funding and planning of their activities, can all be carried out via the Internet, said Zhang.

He noted that social media networks, which are relatively free from government monitoring in many countries, also pose new challenges for global antiterrorism efforts.

Terrorist organizations such as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement have released several videos to facilitate their activities in China in recent years and such groups are increasingly using this tactic, Mei Jianming, director of the Anti-terrorism Research Center of the People’s Public Security University of China, told the Global Times on Friday.

In December 2015, Islamic State (IS) released a song in Chinese, calling on Chinese-speaking Muslims to sacrifice themselves on the battlefield.

Separately, in an interview with CNBC on October 5, John Carlin, an assistant attorney general at the US Department of Justice said that IS and others are using platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to reach isolated teens in the US.

Terrorism is a threat faced by global society and should be addressed via international cooperation, said Mei.

The world needs to cooperate first on issues that contain few disagreements and are easy to work on, and also keep providing funding and training in developing countries to improve their anti-terrorism skills, said Wang.

Mei added that the Friday conference is a platform to reach consensus on a wide range of terrorism-related issues which have arisen in cyberspace.

Governments should also encourage Internet companies to play a bigger role in fighting terrorism online, as their workforce have the appropriate cyber security skills, said Zhang.