After an Islamic State-led social media campaign failed to gain traction last week, and after Twitter engaged in an unprecedented counter-offensive by repeatedly suspending or banning thousands of accounts belonging to ISIS supporters, an image appeared online Sunday with a message written in Arabic threatening the life of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
The image, seen above, shows the Twitter logo and a target over Dorsey's face. The message first appeared on JustPasteIt and was translated on BuzzFeed. It reads:
Your virtual war on us will cause a real war on you. You started this failed war. 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. But when our lions [brave men] come and take your breath, you will never come back to life. 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.
As Yahoo Tech notes, some 46,000 Twitter accounts are believed to belong to ISIS sympathizers. And as Daily Dot reports, Twitter has been waging a war of suspensions for a while now, with one commentator estimating that the company had shut down some 20,000 accounts leading up to a planned social media uprising by ISIS on February 26.
At noon that day, ISIS supporters were supposed to make the hashtag #IslamicStateMedia trend worldwide, but the campaign basically failed, as Daily Dot puts it, because of "Kurds and conservative American activists who rhetorically attacked their common enemy so that neither the Arabic- nor English-language campaign had any success whatsoever."
Earlier in February, the hacker collective Anonymous waged its own attack on ISIS-related social media accounts, claiming to have helped shut down 800 Twitter accounts and 12 Facebook pages.
And this made ISIS mad, especially after they were put through the hassle of having to start a bunch of new Twitter accounts.
So now they want to blow up Twitter, and a spokesperson for the company says they are "investigating the veracity of these threats with relevant law enforcement officials."
