The micro-blogging site has refused to stamp out the considerable presence of terrorists on its network. Whereas Facebook is open to discussions of counterterrorism measures, Twitter’s response has been different.
“The response we’ve gotten from Twitter is dismissive to the point of dereliction,” said Mark D. Wallace, CEO of the nonprofit think tank Counter Extremism Project, in recent testimony before Congress. “We have written three letters describing the problem and requesting a sit-down between Twitter and CEP leadership. Twitter has ignored all but one letter, and its reply, simply put, was indifferent at best.”
Twitter has a special appeal for the Islamic terrorism group ISIS, which mines the network for young and impressionable recruits. Wallace, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told a congressional subcommittee that Twitter is the “the gateway drug … where vulnerable individuals (usually young people) are first exposed to propaganda and radical content. … Twitter is the introductory point into this world.”
Estimates are that 30,000 foreign fighters, including at least 250 Americans, have traveled or attempted to travel to Syria or Iraq to fight with terrorist groups like ISIS. The ability to recruit and radicalize on social media has no doubt contributed to those figures.
In the past three months, Wallace’s group CEP has profiled some 90 Americans who have allegedly joined or attempted to join ISIS. Among them was a 20-year-old Alabama college student, who CEP says was recruited on Twitter, left her Hoover, Ala., home in November 2014 to join ISIS in Syria and has since become a bride and a widow of a jihadi fighter.
Another notable is Ali Shukri Amin, a 17-year-old from Manassas, Va., who recruited and propagandized for ISIS on several online platforms, including Twitter. He was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison after garnering financial support for ISIS by directing Twitter followers to donate to the terror group through Bitcoin.
CEP just days ago released the names of 48 most prolific worldwide ISIS recruiters on Twitter, including, for instance, a woman who issued a kill list of U.S. Army servicemen on Twitter.
Twitter’s terms of service prohibit specific violent threats such as those, but CEP said the kill list remained for all to see. Twitter has indeed suspended some accounts belonging to terrorists and their sympathizers. But there has been no indication an all-out scrub of ISIS accounts is on the agenda. Twitter yesterday declined to comment specifically, but said it had fielded 2,436 information requests from U.S. law enforcement in the first half of this year and said it was recently praised by the FBI for shutting down certain terrorist accounts.
Proactive monitoring of the network for terrorist activity is the only way to disrupt the flow of information for ISIS.
“ISIS’ presence on social media is a cancer,” Wallace told Congress late last month. “It continues to metastasize, largely unaddressed by government, the private sector, or social media companies.”
It’s time for Twitter to start responding to CEP and address the problem of its network doubling as a vessel for terrorist propaganda that violates its own terms of service.
©2015 the Boston Herald Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
