Barely minutes after the news broke of yesterday’s terrorist attack on the Bardo Museum in Tunis, in which 22 people, the vast majority of them foreign tourists, were murdered, jihadi sympathizers were taking to Twitter to crow about their latest success.

“Tunisia is contributing the most number of mujahideen to the front and in the Islamic State alhamdulillah,” asserted one tweet, in a triumphalist tone that was typical of hundreds of similar declarations.

The  attack underlined in particularly gruesome fashion one of the key findings of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2015 Report Card on how social media giants are dealing with online terrorist and extremist campaigns. Twitter, which received a ‘C’ grade, is deemed by the Center to be the “online marketing weapon of choice for extremists of all types. There have been hundreds of thousands of tweets that often serve as the key link in online communications and marketing of groups like ISIS.”

Still, Twitter executives are at least starting to realize that there is a serious problem here—last month, founder Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo even received threats after jihadi accounts were blocked—but the Center says more effort is required if the company is to get to grips with the awkward reality that blocked accounts can be reopened under another name, while removed tweets can be tweeted again and remain online for hours before they are rediscovered.

Among the leaders of the class, when it comes to dealing with online terror and hate campaigns, is Facebook, which achieved a B+/A- grade from the Center. Simon Wiesenthal Center Associate Dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper, who spoke at the launch of the report in New York, praised the company’s willingness to swiftly remove offensive pages, as well as its readiness to work with monitoring organizations. Cooper added that Facebook had also developed technology that would prevent banned members for reopening accounts using different names.

The report, authored by the Center’s Senior Researcher, Rick Eaton, and its Director of Government Affairs, Mark Weitzman, surveyed a wide range of social media platforms, many of which performed worryingly badly. VK.com, a Russian networking site, obtained an F, as it is increasingly becoming a viable alternative to Facebook for jihadis, whose adherence to a premodern ideology doesn’t prevent them from being among the early adopters of postmodern technology. Another F went to SureSpot, an encrypted chat service which guarantees users total privacy, while Kik, an online chat space with a growing jihadi following, received a D.

What’s striking is how extremists swarm around particular themes, turning them into effective, emotionally-charged messaging campaigns. As an example, Eaton described how Palestinian terrorist sympathizers hijacked the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag that followed the January massacre at the Paris magazine, Charlie Hebdo. In its stead they used #JeSuisCouteau—literally, “I am knife”—in thousands of tweets paying homage to Hamza Matrouk, a Palestinian who stabbed 12 people on a bus in Tel Aviv on January 21.

Meanwhile, Weitzman observed that the Charlie Hebdo atrocity was also an opportunity for the Iranian regime to engage in unvarnished anti-Semitism, by commissioning a Holocaust cartoon competition in response, and using social media to announce it. The winning entry, which grafted a photograph of the Auschwitz extermination camp onto a drawing of Israel’s security barrier, employed a technique that, Weitzman noted, is extremely popular on social media—the abuse of historic images of Jewish suffering by Palestinian propagandists.

With the swarming comes sheer volume. Weitzman spoke about a Turkish study which recorded that, on July 17, 2014, at the height of the summer war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, there were more than 27,000 tweets in Turkish claiming that Hitler was right about the Jews. In turn, these tweets drew more than 30,000 responses.  “If we were to quantify the trend here, we’d be talking about six or seven figures, maybe more,” Rabbi Cooper added.

The only way to buck the trend, the Center believes, is for social media companies to rigorously police the extremist content that is shared on their platform. As for the rest of us, the Center’s report neatly demonstrates the crying need for a more coordinated, more imaginative social media strategy for the good guys.

To access the 2015 Digital Terrorism and Hate Report, go to http://digitalhate.net, register with your email, and enter the password: digitalhate.

[Photo: mustafa sayed / YouTube ]