The team behind a social network being used by Islamic State (IS) militants has admitted it cannot prevent the spread of extremist material.
Diaspora is a decentralised network with data stored on many private servers which cannot be controlled by any single administrator.IS is believed to have switched to Diaspora after Twitter upped its efforts to block accounts.
Diaspora’s creators said they were “concerned” about the activities.
In a blog post, they wrote: “Various newspapers have reported that members of the Islamic State (IS) have set up accounts on Diaspora to promote the group’s activities.
“In the past, they have used Twitter and other platforms, and are now migrating to free and open source software.”
The post explained that Diaspora’s network is spread across several independent servers – known as pods – which are not controlled by the Diaspora team
“There is therefore no way for the project’s core team to manipulate or remove contents from a particular node in the network (which we call a “pod”),” the blog post explained.
“This may be one of the reasons which attracted IS activists to our network.”
Diaspora was launched in 2010, paid for by a crowdfunding campaign set up by four students in New York
