New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness Bulletin- 26 FEB 2025 -A Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization, the Coalition for a Safer Web, released a report on February 3 revealing that foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), such as ISIS and al-Qa’ida (AQ), use generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on social media to inspire lone offender attacks against the Jewish community in the U.S.
According to the report, FTOs frequent online platforms where Americans protest the conflict in the Middle East to incite attacks against Jewish communities.
FTOs employed manipulated GenAI videos, programs, and memes of Gaza’s destruction and injured Palestinians to appeal to individual bad actors in the U.S. to incite acts of retaliation against Israel’s supporters in the U.S. The videos used voice cloning software to create news programs in English to encourage a “younger, more persuadable” demographic to avenge civilian casualties in Gaza. The groups compiled “target identification packages,” which showed geospatial photos of Jewish centers in New York City, Miami, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities abroad. The coalition also discovered multiple “how-to guides” and topics, including instructions on using cyber propaganda in publications, such as al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula’s Wolves of Manhattan or ISIS’s Voice of Khurasan.
“Unlike earlier Islamist online media used to incite violence and radicalize followers, this G[en]AI content often has no identifiable ISIS or AQ branding or digital fingerprints,” according to the report. The content, therefore, can breach social media easier and evade content moderation attempts by social media platforms. The report also noted that ISIS and AQ often used GenAI to produce content similar to “help wanted” ads to recruit AI software developers, video producers, and open-source AI experts.
Analyst Comment: GenAI presents opportunities for extremists to push targeted messaging to specific individuals online and reach new audiences in a quicker and more efficient manner than passively sharing content to broad audiences. NJOHSP has examined extremist and FTO use of AI in previously written products, such as Foreign Terrorist Organization Propaganda Evolving Amidst Global Conflicts and Threat Actors Leverage Generative Artificial Intelligence. NJOHSP also discusses GenAI in the 2025 Threat Assessment.