JEDDAH: If you try to search on Google, Yahoo or any other search engine for "How to make a hand bomb", thousands of results will pop up on the screen, giving you easy ways to prepare and make a crude bomb using simple tools available in every household. Worse still, many Arabic chat rooms online actually specialise in promoting such sites, operating around 24 hours a day on the Web and thus increasing the scale of this danger, according to an online news outlet.

Earlier this month, Othman Al-Amer, secretary-general of Research Chairs and Scientific Endowment and head of intellectual security at Hail University, said that 76 percent of the sites that promote and publish terrorism-related content originate and operate from inside the United States. In addition, the Daesh terrorist group publishes more than 250,000 tweets on the social network Twitter each week.

Meanwhile, Abdulmunim Al-Mushawah, head of Sakinah Campaign, explained that the figures and statistics for combating terrorist organizations on social networking websites differ from one day to the next, adding: “It is very difficult to define a fixed number during long or even short periods.”

On such websites, many terrorist organizations including Daesh promote and market extremist thoughts and hostile ideas against Islam and Muslims under many titles, using more than 146,000 electronic platforms.

Al-Mushawah said the important factor is embedded in the interactive countering of such extremist ideology: “There is no doubt that these platforms are important and widespread, but the more important and influential factor is their interactive presence online which invites dialogue and discussion among the public."

He said that terrorist and extremist groups such as Daesh and others try to move from one platform to another, using a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram with the aim of finding incubator environments to attract more young people to join them, mainly following particular terrorist attacks when tensions are high.

In 2014 the US revealed a plan for an information alliance with Western and Islamic states to coordinate the efforts to combat Daesh electronically, especially on social networking sites. This came following a meeting held in Kuwait which was attended by representatives from Bahrain, the UK, Egypt, France, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The final statement of the meeting emphasized the importance of promoting and enhancing information exchange, and training government leaders and official media spokesmen, and encouraging the religious, social and opinion leaders to loudly voice their opinion and views against extremism and violence through traditional and digital media channels.

Al-Mushawah defined four scenarios that Sakinah campaign uses to combat extremist organizations on social networking sites. First, the campaign uses discussions, dialogues and confrontation to give the other side a chance to re-think its views. Second, the campaign starts building and disseminating good Islamic doctrines and Shariah values. The third approach involves instilling positive trends and thoughts in the misled, while the fourth involves dismantling these extremist campaigns.