After Twitter banned accounts associated with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, affiliates of the militant group are threatening to strike back against the social network's staff and encouraging lone wolves to join in.
The ISIS affiliate tweeted a series of threats, which had to be translated, to employees at Twitter's San Francisco headquarters. At least one of the tweets contained threats against the lives of members of Twitter's staff.
"Every Twitter employee in San Francisco in the United States should bear in mind and watch over himself because on his doorstep there might be a lone wolf assassin waiting," stated a tweet from now-banned user @dawlamoon.
Another tweet stated "lone wolves" across Europe and the mujahadeen have placed attacking Twitter's staff on their agendas. The threatening tweets have been branded with the hashtag, "#The_Concept_of_Lone_Wolf_Attacks."
"Every Twitter employee in San Francisco in the United States should bear in mind and watch over himself because on his doorstep there might be a lone wolf assassin waiting," stated another tweet.
Back in late August, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said his social networking company began aggressively banning accounts that posted images of American journalist James Foley's murder. From there, Twitter started searching out all accounts associated with ISIS and banning them.
After being banished from Twitter, ISIS' tech-savvy supporters migrated to Diaspora. With its decentralized servers, Diaspora made a perfect home for ISIS' radical propaganda until the social networking site began searching out supporters of the militant group and asking administrators to ban them.
"Each pod administrator has final say over the content hosted on their pod, and we, and our entire community of members, work to help our podmins to keep the network healthy and growing," said Diaspora. "We will continue our efforts to talk with the podmins, but we want to emphasize once again that the project's core team is not able to decide what podmins should do."
As ISIS continues its efforts to establish a global caliphate, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been traveling to countries in the Middle East attempting to bring together a coalition to fight the militant group and its radical ideologies. As the U.S. push Sunni Arab states to counter ISIS' message, a senior State Department official traveling with Kerry said it will be a difficult but necessary path.
"It's going to be a very difficult, long road to get there, but it's something that the region and our partners in the Gulf can play a really important role in," said the official. "And there's a number of different ways that they can do that, both in terms of just their relationships, in terms of their encouragement, in terms of their financial contributions, in terms of lifting the burden that the government here has."
