The fight against jihadist terrorism is increasingly moving to cyberspace. Last year, Spanish security forces promoted the removal of 14,411 violent content from the Internet, mostly linked to the most radical Islam and, to a lesser extent, far-right extremism and white supremacy. The figure means that each day 39 web pages were located that contained videos, photos, text documents or profiles in which terrorism was proselytized. 75% of this content (more than 2,000 gigabytes) could finally be removed and, in this way, avoid more than 65 million views, as detailed this Thursday by Francisco Coria, head of the Anti-Terrorism Division of the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime (CITCO, dependent on the Ministry of the Interior) in a conference on the fight against terrorism and violent radicalism on the Internet organized by CITCO itself and the Global Internet Forum against Terrorism (GIFT).
The figures for material detected in 2025 represent an exponential increase compared to the previous year, when 3,208 of these violent contents were intervened on the different internet platforms, and 2023, when there were 2,862. These figures represented a daily average of eight localized content, five times less. Coria has detailed that a good part of the more than 14,000 contents removed during the past year occurred in three large international operations coordinated by the European Union Agency for Police Cooperation (Europol), the so-called Reference Action Days and in which Spain participated through the National Unit for the Removal of Illicit Contents (UNECI), of CITCO itself.
The first of these days took place in February 2025 and was focused on the social network Pinterest. Then, Spanish security forces removed 4,451 contents. The next, focused on intercepting violent content aimed at minors, was carried out in May and made it possible to locate 393. The last operation, focused on online gaming platforms, identified 5,262 content related to the recruitment of adolescents by jihadist networks.
So far in 2026, another of these Reference Days of Action has already been celebrated. It was between February 19 and March 3 and the 13 participating countries – including Spain – managed to remove more than 1,100 hours of audio from the Internet (the equivalent of 46 days of continuous listening) of violent content. These were, for the most part, speeches by terrorist leaders and nasheedIslamist musical themes that have catchy rhythms that include sounds of gunshots or the clash of sabers, which police experts consider effective in attracting new followers among young people.
The relevance of this material in the radicalization process of jihadists was emphasized at the day by Carola García-Calvo, principal researcher of the Program on Violent Radicalization and Global Terrorism of the Elcano Royal Institute, who detailed that seven out of 10 jihadists were radicalized exclusively through the Internet, either social networks, instant messaging applications, web pages, forums and chats.
