ISIS Threatens Twitter

Twitter Executive Board Chairman, Jack Dorsey

Twitter is one of IS’s main avenues to quickly spread content; it has posted beheading videos on the service and has attempted to recruit new members there, too. In some cases, actual fighters tweet from the front lines of battle in Syria. A recent study showed that as many 46,000 Twitter accounts were used by IS sympathizers during a three-month period last fall.

A new posting by the Islamic State is encouraging its members to kill the founder of Twitter and other employees of the social network.

The declaration, which was originally posted on justpaste.it, and then translated by BuzzFeed, is addressed to Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter in 2006 and is now chairman of its executive board. The threat takes issue with Twitter’s attempts to thwart IS’s dissemination of propaganda on the social network. The company frequently shuts down any official IS accounts as they pop up.

“Your virtual war on us will cause a real war on you,” the post reads. Though it was shared online by IS supporters, its source has not been confirmed. “We told you from the beginning it’s not your war, but you didn’t get it and kept closing our accounts on Twitter, but we always come back.”

Though Twitter’s official terms of use policy bans “direct, specific threats of violence against others,” the company told my colleague Mike Isikoff that it does not proactively monitor its networks for terrorist activity. This laissez-faire attitude has spurred Congress to pressure Twitter to ramp up its efforts at blocking the terrorist organization’s online presence. 

Now, it seems that IS is trying to intimidate Twitter executives with a call from all its members around the globe to attack the company.

“For the ‘individual jihadi’ all over the world, target the Twitter company and its interests in any place, people, and buildings, and don’t allow any one of the atheists to survive,” the post reads.

A Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed that the company is looking into the veracity of the posts’s threats with law enforcement.