Jack Dorsey and his employees receive death threats for blocking ISIS accounts on Twitter
A recent anonymous message posted on Pastebin website allegedly calls for the death to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and and several Twitter employees.
The message contained a digital face which was at cross sights of a gun and vaguely resembled Jack Dorsey; this message popped up on Sunday in the reports by BuzzFeed and NBC reports.
However Jack Dorsey has not commented about these threats in his Sunday tweets. On Monday a representative of Twitter said “Our security team is investigating the veracity of these threats with relevant law enforcement officials.”
Twitter, an online social networking site where people can connect with each other and get updates on the topic of their interest is often at cross hairs with ISIS aka The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
As per Twitter’s policy a person cannot tweet/post any such content which would call for violence or threats to others lives. And if the site finds any such content it is immediately blocked. On the similar lines the site has been removing the posts/tweets of ISIS member accounts as soon as it is posted and this is the major reason for the ISIS rage against Dorsey and his Twitter colleagues.
As per BuzzFeed the anonymous post read, “Your virtual war on us will cause a real war on you.ย 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. 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.”
ISIS is a militant group that has been occupying areas of Syria and Iraq and is considered to be a major threat by the US and other countries, which have been battling their forces against ISIS in these areas. Twitter and other social networking sites have long been used as a medium by the ISIS to spread their message across to their followers and also to encourage them to further carry out attacks.
Not only that these militants have also posted videos of violence like beheading and execution carried out by them, ย on the social networking sites which had to be blocked or removed.
In the month of January the ISIS had posted a video to encourage the followers of ISIS to carry out attacks in the Western interests as reported by CBS news. The ISIS followers who are banned from entering Syria and Iraq were allegedly egged on by this video to carry out mass attacks on the police or military forces in their home towns i.e. U.S., France and U.K.
Prior to that in October ISIS said that the employees and the management of Twitter should be assassinated as reported to CNET by Twitter CEO Costolo, “After regularly suspending their accounts, which we’ve been doing, some folks affiliated with the organization used Twitter to declare that the employees of Twitter and the management of Twitter should be assassinated.”
Since October Twitter provided special security to come of its employees and also made them aware to pay attention to their surroundings for any such threats.