The Islamic State no longer holds onto the vast territory of eastern Syria and northern Iraq that it once controlled at its height in 2015, a land mass the size of the United Kingdom. The group was territorially defeated by the US-led Defeat-ISIS coalition of nations in 2019. But ever since, the group and its affiliates have remained an omnipresent threat, both online and offline.
Recent studies show that the Islamic State’s online presence remains dominant through gore videos. Therefore, this Insight will examine how the terrorist group still significantly leverages gore sites, which promise to showcase ‘real life’ violence, for propaganda. With no restrictions on accessing and downloading content on most gore sites, plenty of violent extremist material is largely consumed by minors and is recirculated on popular social media platforms.
These gore sites exhibit images and videos of murders, torture, executions, beheadings and dismemberments. Some of the videos uploaded on four gore websites, just in the short timeframe between August 25 and 28, were found to be carrying violent extremist material linked with the Islamic State. The videos showcased graphic examples of the aforementioned themes. There was often an overlap of content across gore sites, and videos were available for free download as well.
A study of 24 gore-related websites, released in July by Vox-Pol institute, also found the largest proportion of terrorist content was produced by the Islamic State.
Of the 24 websites examined in the Vox-Pol study, 19 offered terrorist content as a specifically curated topic category, in which salafi-jihadi was the most common ideology represented in the videos. Specific keywords can take people to a range of videos propagated by the Islamic State. The study found over 12,000 terrorist materials on these sites, including Christchurch, Buffalo and Halle attack livestreams, accruing thousands of combined views.
What is a Gore Site?
Gore sites act as online platforms where real-life acts of violence are shared. These sites mainly attract a niche group known as “gore seekers” who seek shocking and graphic material, and violent extremist groups that post their propaganda material on these sites. Despite hosting sections for terrorist videos, gore sites typically show no outward signs of political or religious ideology.
Emerging in the early 2000s, gore websites initially hosted Jihadi executions, which emerged from the second Chechen war (1999–2009), but eventually became platforms for Islamic State’s decapitation videos. The terrorist group use these horrendous acts of violence as a symbol for degrading the victim both in the eyes of their in-group (whose interests and values they purport to defend) and their out-group (the bourgeoisie, heads of state—the “other”), and to shock so-called infidels.
In the 2022 book, Watching Murder: ISIS, Death Videos and Radicalization, which explores “Jihadi murder videos and the people who watch them on the internet”, author Simon Cottee writes that the ISIS’s horrors “continue to live on in the dark recesses of the internet, where gore enthusiasts watch, edit, share and comment on video footage of its most monstrous depredations, including torture and mass murder.” The gore fans –curators and enthusiasts — who are said to be frequently conceding to harbour voyeuristic and base impulses, like it because “gore tells it like it is” and it “alerts” them about the existential reality and scope of human wickedness.
Gore sites form a key component of the virtual caliphate promoted by Islamic State outlets and affiliates. They have contributed to the reshaping of jihadist terrorism into a borderless phenomenon. The digital jihadist ecosystem—leveraging online messaging, virtual recruitment, and attack coordination within encrypted spaces—is dynamic, self-directed, and globally dispersed.
On the gore sites, a lot of videos carrying footage of executions have been enhanced with visual effects and captions, and are often paired with music to glamorise the violence. The users of the gore sites were found to be actively engaged with each other by posting grabs of close-up shots of execution videos in the comment section of the posts.
Islamic State Gore Videos Attract Millions of Views
Islamic State continues to be lethal, resilient, and adaptive, and jihadist videos featured on gore-related websites continue to be circulated due to the visceral, bloody nature of the content. In fact, traffic to gore sites has increased with the real-world conflicts and war, most recently following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the recent escalation of Israel’s attacks on Gaza following Hamas attacks in October 2023.
One gore site studied by Vox-Pol, which was found to be hosting a video containing footage from the Islamic State attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall, gained over 650,000 views between March 2024 and May 2024. On the same site, another Islamic State video uploaded in 2016 had more than 11 million views. The most visited gore-related websites largely feature content in English and receive up to 334,000 visits per month from the UK alone.
Islamic State’s Gore Content Attracts Minors
Gore content does not evade the youngest users of the internet. In 2024, a 12-year-old boy in France was convicted on terror charges after authorities found 1,739 jihadi videos, including decapitation and shootings, on his devices. His radicalisation began with innocent Islamic queries, but algorithms and curiosity quickly drew him into encrypted chats and violent ISIS propaganda, deepening his involvement in gore websites. He was learning how to kill while gorging on videos of decapitation and gruesome torture.
This case is one of the brutal reminders of how minors are getting radicalised online, indeed through gore content, at a meteoric speed. Tech-savvy and quick to adapt, children, especially those in search of an identity or a purpose or who are simply loners, are consuming extremist and terrorist propaganda material and distributing such material themselves.
The recent Vox-Pol study states that gore sites are numerous in number, free to access and lack child safety measures. Only four of the 24 gore websites studied request users to “confirm” their age, thus making the sites exceedingly easy to access for minors.
A July 2025 report reveals that the Islamic State’s digital activities continue to play a central role in its efforts to sustain and spread propaganda, radicalise individuals online, and recruit followers at an accelerated pace, with a particular focus on minors. A further 2024 study revealed that 87% of violent Salafi-Jihadists (VSJs) demonstrated online engagement. Minors on the path to radicalisation are either engaging with their peers or unnamed external players, who are feeding them information, pictures and violent gore videos.
Counterterrorism agencies are facing the fact that terrorist attackers, plotters, and followers are younger than ever. For instance, nearly two-thirds of ISIS-linked arrests in Europe in nine months between 2023 and 2024 were of teenagers. These are youth who have potentially been heavily influenced by ultraviolent, radicalising content consumed mostly online. Even “764” – the global network of online communities that glorify violence, including sextortion, the distribution of child sex abuse material (CSAM), swatting, SIM swapping and doxing, targets and exploits vulnerable individuals online, particularly children.
Gore Content and Cross-Platform Proliferation
On 2 August, Islamic State released a 13-minute video from the group’s self-proclaimed Sahel province that showed a combat between them and the armed forces of Mali and Niger. This apparently took place in May and June, and showed footage of the execution of prisoners. Clips from the video were shared on Instagram, Telegram, RocketChat, Element, TikTok, X and SimpleX. Five days later, on 7 August, Counter Extremism Project researchers located ten accounts on Instagram that posted IS and pro-IS propaganda with at least one uploaded clip from a video that included execution footage. By 11 August, four accounts were removed and six were still online, the CEP website stated.
On Telegram—a less regulated, encrypted platform— IS continually broadcasts gory images to frighten enemies, attracts potential recruits, shares propaganda, communicates privately, and coordinates attacks through secure groups and channels. Here, users engage in “shitposting and goreposting,” sharing videos designed to shock and provoke reactions from other members. In the past year, people have been jailed for sharing gore content on Telegram and WhatsApp. On TikTok, multiple posts featuring pictures of IS executioner Mohammed Emwazi, more commonly known as Jihadi John, and masked figures pointing guns at prisoners wearing the notorious orange uniform worn by the group’s victims in the execution videos, surfaced.
Islamic State continues to leverage social media platforms and encrypted messaging apps to spread propaganda, radicalise individuals, and recruit followers—focusing especially on younger audiences who are highly active online and more susceptible to radicalisation.
For example, one gore site that showcases several IS execution videos under various graphic categories, and does not require age verification for accessing its content, has an X profile with over 385K followers. Although no IS execution videos could be located on its X page, its website address is advertised on the account for “more” gore. This gore site also shares pornographic material on its site, and on X as well.
Links Between Incel Forums, Pornography and Gore Sites
There is a notable overlap between gore content and graphic violent pornography online.
The Vox-Pol study stated that a popular incel forum had 2,000+ posts directing users to gore-related websites, some of which advertised purchasable folders of videos of women being murdered. Most users are repeat visitors, often accessing gore websites through shared links or referrals from porn sites. Given the overlap between gore and pornography sites, objectification and misogynistic abuse were widespread in comment sections. On Instagram, some accounts that post only “banned” videos contain pornography and gore content as well.
Most advertisements on gore sites belong to pornography or gambling, and none of them require user payments to access content.
In France, counterterrorism experts found that for minors getting radicalised by IS, the process often starts with exposure to violent pornography.
Conclusion and Recommendations
The mobilisaiton of Islamic State on gore sites, and the recirculation of content on mainstream platforms, needs cross-sector attention to curb. Most gore sites share illegal videos, including those produced by proscribed terrorist entities, and they have no public policy or moderation process. Since the illegal content is downloaded and shared on social media platforms, the onus is on tech companies to have a stronger monitoring process to ensure such illegal content is not available for viewing, as it goes against their moderation policies.
Some platforms can use facial scanning to estimate a user’s age, as some pornography sites have implemented. The use of content blocklists, restricting certain tags, and limiting access to content can reduce the usefulness of these sites for violent extremist groups. The tech companies can also implement regular audits of moderation practices and the development of AI tools to flag borderline content, without infringing on free expression. Incorporating regulatory technologies like content-matching services would strengthen the detection and elimination of terrorist content. Tech companies and governments can lead and coordinate action on terrorist and violent extremist-operated websites.
Social media platforms can moderate content by using software or tools that detect language associated with gore content. Tech companies can address digital radicalisation while upholding fundamental rights by collaborating with initiatives such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and Tech Against Terrorism (TAT).
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Sonia Sarkar is pursuing European Master’s in Human Rights and Democratisation at the Global Campus of Human Rights. She holds an MPhil in Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation from Trinity College Dublin. Her main research area is the transnational networks of the far-right in Global South and Global North. As a journalist for over two decades, she has reported on religious extremism alongside politics, and political violence from different parts of Asia. Her bylines have appeared in The Telegraph (India), South China Morning Post, Al Jazeera, Religion Unplugged, DW and Nikkei Asia.
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