Social media a potent instrument in terrorists' toolkit: Jaishankar

New Delhi, Oct 29: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Saturday urged the international community for collective action to counter terrorism at UNSC counter terrorism committee. He expressed concern that terrorism is only growing and social media platforms have turned into potent instruments in the toolkit of terrorists.

"UNSC, in the past 2 decades, has evolved an important architecture built primarily around the Counter-Terrorism Sanctions Regime, to combat this menace. This has been very effective in putting those countries on notice that had turned terrorism into a state-funded enterprise," said Jaishankar.

"Despite this, the threat of terrorism is only growing and expanding, particularly in Asia and Africa, as successive reports of the 1267 Sanctions Committee monitoring reports have highlighted," he said.

"Another add-on to the existing worries for governments around the world is the use of unmanned aerial systems by terrorist groups and organised criminal networks. Being a relatively low-cost option, with increasing ease of accessibility, misuse of these unmanned aerial platforms for this nefarious purposes by terrorist groups such as weapons and explosives delivery and targeted attacks have become an imminent danger," Jaishankar remarked.

"In recent years, terrorist groups, ideological fellow travellers particularly in open and liberal societies and lone wolf attackers have enhanced their capabilities by gaining access to tech. They use tech, money & ethos of open societies to attack freedom, tolerance and progress," the foreign minister said.

"Internet and social media platforms have turned into potent instruments in the toolkit of terrorists and militant groups for spreading propaganda, radicalisation, and conspiracy theories aimed at destabilising societies," he said.

"The technologies have also thrown up new challenges for governments and regulatory bodies due to their potential vulnerability for their misuse by non-state actors, given the very nature of some of these technologies and the nascent regulatory environment," Jaishnakar said.

"India will be making a voluntary contribution of half a million dollars to the UN Trust Fund for Counter Terrorism this year to augment the efforts of UNOCT in providing capacity-building support to member states in preventing and countering the threat of terrorism," EAM S Jaishankar said.