The Islamic State and its online supporters, furious with social media providers’ efforts to ban their accounts, issued a new round of death threats against Twitter staff — and created their own social media platform.
It’s called “Khelafabook,” and as described by Vocativ, it’s still a work in progress:
The site looks a lot like Facebook, but as yet is incomplete. Large portions of text in the ‘about’ and ‘contact’ pages are filled with lorem ipsum placeholder text, and the site is struggling to stay online, meaning that registration is still impossible.
News.com.au in Australia adds that the site greets visitors with the promise: “We love to die as much as you love to live.” Lest you get the idea that ISIS is a gang of murderous primitives, the site declares one of its purposes is to “show the world we do not only carry guns and live in caves.”
The name “Khelafabook” is adopted from the Arabic word khelafah, or “caliphate,” the religiously-ordained Muslim empire the Islamic State portrays itself as.
According to Vocativ’s report, the site promises to be available in a number of languages, including English — but, oddly enough, not Arabic, unless that is meant to be taken for granted. The confusing GoDaddy registration information for the site is from an Egyptian who claims to be currently living in Mosul, which he identities as being part of the Islamic State.
“Several Twitter accounts related to the hacker group Anonymous, which is currently waging an online war against ISIS, have already listed this site as a potential next target,” Vocativ reports. “The threat from hackers might be one of the reasons for Khelafabook’s current instability.”
If this jihadi social media site is the half-baked work of a lone ISIS sympathizer, he has greatly overestimated his chances of keeping it alive, never mind building it into something that could challenge Facebook or Twitter. News.com.au and the UK Independent are already just about ready to shovel dirt on it, with the latter news organization reporting that Khelafabook appears to have gone down for good late Monday evening. It could always come back under a new registration, of course, which would suit the Anonymous hackers just fine. They love a good game of whack-a-mole.
Also, ISIS would find a network dedicated exclusively to its supporters less useful than a presence on huge social media platforms with millions of users around the world, giving it a large pool of potential recruits and an efficient transmission system for its propaganda. They can’t accomplish that by huddling around an amateur website and grunting at each other.