The Times reported this week that thousands of social media accounts connected to terror groups, including Iran-backed Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, have been allowed to operate freely on mainstream platforms. While everyone can see what is posted on Instagram and X, it’s much harder to tell the extent of the problem on encrypted services such as Telegram and WhatsApp.

These accounts promote violent extremist ideologies and terrorism against Western targets, primarily against Jews. They go far beyond ideological preaching and incitement, and include practical information about how to build bombs and suicide vests. For example, one account on Telegram called “Electronic Hizbullah”, which boasts 224,000 followers, published a video of Israeli hostages being executed. Another example The Times also found freely available on X and Instagram was from a Bahraini terrorist calling on “all free people in the world” to “stab and kill every Zionist walking in the cities and neighborhoods of our Arab and Muslim countries”.

Britain’s Online Safety Act (OSA) rightly classifies both hate speech and terrorism as priority harms. But you wouldn’t know it from regulators’ response to this content. This is not borderline material, nor is it ambiguous. It is direct incitement to terrorist violence, framed in explicitly antisemitic terms. Yet Ofcom, despite holding meaningful enforcement powers against terrorist content since March this year, has not acted. Its response so far reflects a lack of urgency and a worrying lack of ambition to ensure the OSA delivers what Parliament intended. Meanwhile, counter-terrorism police appear to be standing back.

The legal framework is there. Terrorist content and incitement to racial or religious hatred are already outlawed under the Terrorism Act 2006 and the Public Order Act 1986. According to the OSA, platforms must take proactive measures to prevent such content from appearing and spreading. And Ofcom has the power to fine them if they don’t.

Here, the issue goes further than the law itself. It’s also about regulatory will and political priorities. Despite the Act’s tough language, the regulator has so far been slow and cautious, often citing the need for “proportionality”. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s influence in softening the implementation of the Act has tilted enforcement towards platform protection and the financial cost to services, rather than public protection.

The impetus on platforms to remove terrorism content ought to be so strong that instances like these are prohibitively costly. When the stakes are this high, one could argue that it is fair to limit profit, rather than putting the public at increased risk of extreme violence.

What happens in the virtual realm influences what happens in real life. A recent study found that since 7 October 2023, there have been on average eight premeditated antisemitic terror plots and attacks per month in the US, accounting for a quarter of all hate-related terror and plots. Last month, Israeli Embassy staff Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgrim were shot dead outside a Jewish museum in Washington DC. The perpetrator shouted: “free, free Palestine.” In Britain last year, a Jewish security charity recorded a record number of antisemitic incidents, with damage and desecration to Jewish property rising by 246% on the previous year.

And yet this online coordinated incitement by established terror organizations against Jews is still being treated as a fringe concern. When calls to kill Jews are openly hosted on major platforms, the threat is no longer hypothetical: it’s operational.

Britain cannot claim to take national security seriously while allowing this content to circulate with impunity. Services want to maximize profits, not safety. Meta and YouTube have announced plans to reduce human moderation, which will only make the problem worse. The laws at the Government’s disposal are our last line of defense; what’s missing is the will to use them. We must prioritize national security and public safety over the profiteering libertarianism of the tech industry and the malevolent designs of terrorists.

---

Dr Limor Simhony Philpott is a writer and researcher focusing on antisemitism, extremism and defence.

limorsimhony

---

China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

---

Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

miquelvilam

---