Islamic State's death threats to Twitter staff

A rebel fighter fires his weapon during what the rebels said were clashes with Islamic State fighters at the frontline in Aleppo's northern countryside. REUTERS/Jalal Al-Mamo

The Islamic State issued death threats to staff at Twitter after the social network suspended accounts used to disseminate news of their atrocities, claims the company’s chief executive.

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Dick Costolo revealed the threats in a speech at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit: “After we started suspending their accounts, some folks affiliated with the organization used Twitter to declare that employees of Twitter and their management should be assassinated.
“Obviously that’s a jarring thing for anyone to deal with,” he said, reports the New York Post.
“It’s against our terms of service. It’s against the law in many of the countries in which we operate for them to use it to promote their organization. And when we do find those accounts, we shut them down. We shut them down quite actively.”
The use of Twitter by Islamic State is a key pillar of their strategy to convince the world of their "righteous" cause, glorify their victories and attract would-be jihadists.
Their accounts, often characterised by the use of the black flag as their profile picture, show fighters posing with tanks and guns they have seized from captured Syrian and Iraqi bases, or at the site of downed jets.
They show pictures of children and schools they say were targetted by the West.
And their supporters - many of them women - use Twitter to recruit others, boasting of "five star jihad" and posting photos of a band of niqab-clad women in Syria "standing by their men".
Earlier this week Twitter sued the US government, claiming that restrictions on what it can publish amount to a violation of its free speech.
Currently the US government can make requests for data on Twitter’s users, but also prevent the company from making news of those requests public.
“It is our belief that we are entitled under the First Amendment to respond to our users’ concerns and to the statements of US government officials by providing information about the scope of US government surveillance,” said Ben Lee, Twitter's vice-president. “We should be free to do this in a meaningful way, rather than in broad inexact ranges.”