Jihadists From Islamic State Mock, Berate And Threaten America On Twitter, Have Their Accounts Suspended
The Jihadists having marched into major portions of Iraq and captured large swathes of land have been feeling quite confident to challenge America. Apart from traditional techniques of releasing video and audio, the jihadists from Islamic State, have boasted of killings and threatening U.S. on multiple social media accounts.
Taking a note of the same, Twitter Inc. decided to take action and has suspended “dozens” of Twitter accounts linked to Islamic State (IS) jihadists. The company claims, these accounts were used to threaten the United States and post a string of grisly images. As expected, members of the terror organization attempted to reactivate the blocked accounts, only to face another swift closure.
The Twitter accounts had been repeatedly used to boast of victories in Iraq and Syria and threaten U.S forces, reported IB times. Moreover, the ISIS even used other accounts to terrify Twitter users by tricking them into viewing images of corpses. They did so by manipulating the hastag system of tagging and searching images. Some people reported that searching for innocuous hashtags such as #Hawaii pulled images that showed mutilated corpses.
It’s no secret that ISIS routinely employs small children as ‘soldiers for Jihad’. In one particularly graphic tweet, an Australian jihadi published a photograph of his seven-year-old son holding up a severed head. The Daily News reported it had identified at least 10 other ISIS linked accounts which had been suspended in the last week alone. Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, was quoted as saying,
“12 official ISIS provincial-level accounts through which they published all news, military, political, social, religious, for that specific area, were disabled by Twitter on August 11. Over the ensuing days they were reactivated and taken down again three times”
Though the images posted by these alleged ISIS Twitter accounts are undoubtedly graphic and disturbing, each account has a right to appeal deactivation. Moreover, Twitter has a rather liberal policy of not monitoring user content. However, it takes action when alerted to inappropriate posts by other users.
Nu Wexler, a Twitter spokesman, said the company does not “comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons.” But clarified accounts are disabled or suspended if they break the site’s rules. Tweeting to openly support the ISIS is certainly not reason enough to get the accounts banned, but making threats or publishing graphic, bloody content would be.”
[Image Credit |Twitter]
