The social network TikTok is one of the most popular among young people nowadays. It has a fresh and straight forward approach: watching short video that can edited from the user’s account. This app has over 600 million users worldwide, but everything that shines is gold, it has also become a target for sexual predator and extremist groups.

According to The Walt Street Journal, extremist propaganda from the elite terrorist, Daesh or ISIS, that has distributed video using this famous app, which has a large number of teenagers. This group has spread short edited videos with funny effect of armed military forces; there have been videos of women self proclaiming to be “pride jihadists.”

Some videos follow the style of uploaded videos on other platforms: showing dead bodies and Islamic slogans. There has also been material corresponding to other videos displaying executions carried by this group, people supporting its ideology, and supposed member carrying weapons, report says.

According to The Wall Street Journal, some of these videos mix violent images with more pleasant ones; it is possible that this is with the idea to associate ISIS acts with young movements.

The real reach of ISIS’ propaganda in TikTok is unknown. The company has banned from its platform a few dozen accounts because the broke the rules on terrorist acts and terrorists organizations.

None of the closed accounts was very successful; the one with the most followers had a thousand followers. What is truly concerning is that these videos become an “initiation” to lead users to more extremist propaganda. Some of the videos had dozens of likes.

The identified pots by the social intelligence agency, Storyful, seem to lure in users of TikTok as part of a new display of strength, and a possible recruitment tool as American troops leave Syria.

The videos came as a reveal from the extremist group last month after a message from the leader, Abu Bakr-Baghdadi, in which he ask his followers to double efforts to promote the cause; this after losing control of the last stage of the self-proclaimed Caliphate in some parts of Syria and Israel in early 2019.

The Islamic State’s posts on TikTok are not always direct recruitment calls; sometimes they pretend to draw enthusiasm and support for the group, especially those videos with hymns. “Rhyming, rhythm, lyrics, and enthusiastic presentation are attractive to young people”, said Elisabeth Kendall, expert in extremism from Oxford University in the UK.

Extremist content has become the latest challenge to tackle from the company after legislators and rival companies accused the Chinese app of censuring content on behalf of the Chinese government. The app is, next to Fornite, on the digital phenomena of the moment. TikTok has grown in popularity in markets like the US market, especially with teenagers, until becoming the most downloaded app.

“The content promoted by terrorist organizations has no place on TikTok”, stated TikTok’s sources in a statement received by CNBC.

“We ban these accounts and devices associated as soon as they are identified. At the same time, were are working on safer control measures to actively detect these type of suspicious activities.”

Islamic States posts on social networks are not new. This has been done by the group since its inception (a propaganda element that differentiates it from other jihadist groups). In May this year, YouTube revealed that it manually checked over a million videos accused of having content related to terrorism, thus eliminating 90,000 of those because they violated the policy against terrorism, in addition to the millions automatically eliminated by the AI since 2016.

Facebook said it had eliminated more than 26 million posts and videos related to terrorists groups in two years.

TikTok’s usage rules explicitly prohibit criminal organizations to use the app; however, the company considers this to a common problem in all social networks. The presence of extremist content within the app can lead the Asian company to new investigations after one the American regulators took interest on possible censors in the last few months.

Nonetheless, that is not only problem TikTok is facing: the Chinese-based network, whose operation are shady and not very transparent, and, due to these actions and the Communist Party’s interference, the social network has also been called out for promoting pornography, drug trafficking, pedophilia, among other crimes. Aside for being used as a sort of Chinese virtual weapon against its opponents like Hong Kong’s protestors, whose speeches are censor son this app.

Despite its youth, TikTok has been involved in more than one polemic, especially for its Chinese origin, where its original version includes integrated facial recognition. Early this year, TikTok was fine by American authorities for compiling data from minors. Yet, the app still growth day by day, until the point that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, considers  it as it biggest rival.