For this investigation, BuzzFeed News specifies that it followed nine groups on WhatsApp, one of the most popular mobile messaging applications in the world, owned by Facebook. These groups, generally with explicit names – The German Storm or Ku Klux Klan International – welcome several dozen members (a WhatsApp group can bring together up to 256 users).
Emojis diverted
The members of these groups appear to be mostly young. The overseas chinese in canada data news site collected the testimony of one of the active members, who says he is in his twenties and has joined several WhatsApp groups that he found through far-right online networks.
In these groups, BuzzFeed News journalists were able to confirm what the Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism had denounced in October 2018. The German association had publicly challenged WhatsApp and shown that the application's "stickers" function, which allows small images to be easily sent, was being used by German neo-Nazis to share various symbols such as the swastika or the emblems of SS soldiers.
Such images have been shared frequently in recent months in WhatsApp groups infiltrated by BuzzFeed News . Also noted were: message chains mentioning Adolf Hitler or operations against immigrants; memes featuring Adolf Hitler; and the use of certain emojis as Nazi symbols, such as one of a person raising an arm.Is an iPhone more secure than an Android?
The question is recurring: yes, in general, iPhones are more protective than Android phones. In particular because of more careful management of the application store, and also because the security settings are standardized and high level on iOS, while they can vary from one version of Android to another. Mobile operators and manufacturers also do not apply Android updates that correct identified flaws with the same speed. However, using an iPhone is not an absolute guarantee, especially when the hacker has considerable technical and financial resources - it is an iPhone that Jeff Bezos was using at the time of the hack.
