Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and his staff have received death threats from the “Islamic State” (ISIS) group, Costolo told Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit on Friday.
According to the Vanity Fair magazine, after shutting down some of the group’s Twitter accounts, Twitter management dealt with calls for their “assassination.”
“That’s a jarring thing for anyone to deal with,” Costolo was quoted as having said at the summit.
“We take a lot of heat on both sides of the debate,” Costolo added, referring to the tension between those who believe all speech should be allowed and those who believe that Twitter should block some material such as ISIS videos showing the beheading of journalists.
Whenever you have a global public information channel, you’re going to use it for good, and some people are going to use it for nefarious purposes,” he said, according to Vanity Fair.
Costolo noted that ISIS operates outside of the speech that’s protected by Twitter’s terms of use. When the company is alerted, he claimed, it shuts those accounts down “effortlessly.”
This is the second time that it has been reported that Twitter was threatened by ISIS or a related terror group. In September, a Jerusalem-based cell of the ISIS threatened to kill Twitter employees and target its offices if the social media site does not stop closing down ISIS accounts.
Al Musra Al Maqdisia (The Supporters Of Jerusalem), which pledged allegiance to ISIS in February, was among several Islamic State-linked groups and Twitter users to encourage “lone-wolves” to attack Twitter offices in retaliation for hampering jihadi PR efforts, and specifically threatened to “bring the war” to the company’s central headquarters in San Francisco.
The Islamic State has utilized social media as part of a slick PR campaign that has seen it eclipse its rivals in Al-Qaeda among young aspiring jihadis, particularly from the English-speaking world.
By doing away with the need for old-fashioned jihadi internet forums – many of which can only be accessed by recognized members – the group has managed to spread its message, including gruesome images of executions and “martyred” fighters, further than any other Islamist group, and swelled its ranks of foreign fighters.
