Armed narco-terrorist groups in Colombia are utilizing TikTok and other social media platforms to push recruitment videos targeting young children and teenagers, the Colombian newspaper El Colombiano reported on Monday.
According to El Colombiano, armed groups such as the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorist group and the Clan del Golfo are engaged in a scheme described by the newspaper as “Recruitment 2.0.” The strategy sees the use of social media platform algorithms to push content towards Colombian children and teenagers in vulnerable economical situations, seeking to entice them into joining said insurgent organizations.
El Colombiano pointed out that the tactic specifically targets demographic groups of children as they are deemed more “influenceable” and because local criminal laws are more lenient towards children in the event of a future arrest.
The contents, which El Colombiano affirmed are mostly found on TikTok, entice Colombian minors with promises of future riches and luxuries. Other pieces of content reportedly used in the recruitment scheme involve deceitful offers such as false “talent-seeking” soccer tournaments and fake job offers promising competitive wages, all with the same goal of luring victims to join their ranks.
El Colombiano explained that it created a fake TikTok profile for the purposes of its report. Within “one hour,” the newspaper said, the TikTok account’s “For You” section began displaying videos of raspachínes coca leaf collectors, young people in camouflage clothing flaunting their affiliation with guerrilla groups, and individuals showing off cars, motorcycles, liquor, and luxuries, accompanied by ninja emojis — a “recurring visual code across various armed groups.”
Although TikTok has allegedly placed content filters blocking certain guerrilla-related keywords, El Colombiano explained that armed groups are completely bypassing the filters by simply using abbreviations instead of the group’s full name, such as “EP” as a replacement for FARC — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia Marxist terrorist group, which attaches the EP (“People’s Army”) suffix to its initials.
“TikTok blocked the word ‘gaitanistas,’ for example. That is why digital recruiters tend to be more sophisticated and use coded language involving emojis,” Juan David Velasco Montoya, advisor at the Investigation and Prosecution Unit (UIA) of Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction of Peace (JEP), told El Colombiano. The Clan del Golfo sometimes refers to itself as the “Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.”
JEP is a Colombian transitional justice mechanism established nearly a decade ago after FARC and the administration of former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos signed a “peace deal” in 2016 that allegedly saw the “dismantlement” of FARC. In reality, FARC remains active in Colombia ten years after its supposed dismantlement, committing numerous terrorist attacks over the past decade.
A UIA report cited by El Colombiano documented a 66-percent surge in the recruitment of children by Colombian insurgent groups on social media between 2022 and 2025. According to the UIA report, 44 percent of all child recruitment cases documented by the group in 2025 occurred on social media.
UIA reportedly described TikTok as the “most problematic” of the social media platforms for said recruitment. The content allegedly published by the groups on TikTok mainly targets teenagers and predominantly feature messages of money, weapons, and a “life of party and excesses.”
In 2024, Colombian authorities denounced that FARC had been using TikTok to publish content enticing minors to join the Marxist terrorist group. El Colombiano affirmed on Monday that, although Colombian authorities established guidelines to reduce the risk of recruitment by minors last year, “no concrete action has been taken” by the Chinese social media platform.
On the other hand, the recruitment content allegedly published on Facebook targets young adults instead of minors, while content allegedly published on YouTube are instead of a “political” tone. Instagram is allegedly used by Colombian armed groups to push content related to “armed confrontation and the handling of drones turned into weapons.”
UIA also reportedly found that, in addition to organizing the content’s type by platform, the posts also target boys and girls differently by “reinforcing gender stereotypes.” El Colombiano explained that, for example, content seeking to entice girls reportedly centers around the “glorification of physical beauty, dancing, and posing,” while content targeting boys highlights “strength, virility, financial means, weapons, and alcohol as a status symbol.”
According to the UIA report, the group projects that, if the situation were to continue existing as-is, Colombia could face roughly 2,321 new cases of child recruitment between 2026 and 2030 — at an average rate of one new minor every 12 hours.
Luis Fernando Quijano, director of the social services group Corporation for Peace and Social Development (Corpades), explained to El Colombiano on Monday that his organization has been documenting the alarming social media recruitment phenomenon for months.
In some cases, Quijano warned, the recruitment offer is “direct,” with some of the contents directly asking for minors between the ages of 12 and 13 to send a direct message if they want to join an insurgent group. In other cases, the recruitment enlists for international conflicts instead.
“It is recruitment through handouts, through images of young women and young men, and by portraying the illegal military life as very appealing. That is an open invitation for children and adolescents to go there,” Quijano said.
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