14 DAY TRIAL // Collective effort from three hacktivist groups reveals that the online presence of Islamic State supporters is growing, as a list of no less than 9,200 allegedly IS-related Twitter accounts has been published.
A member of CtrlSec outfit, using the online moniker “(xrsone),” started this endeavor following the Charlie Hebdo incident in Paris at the beginning of the year.
Operation enjoyed success in the past
In a post last week on blog-publishing platform Medium he says that initially he collected the social media usernames of about 1,000 terrorists and made them public.
The result was that one of the major social media platforms closed the accounts on its network. (xrsone) said that someone inside the company told him that the decision was incentivized by the bad press generated.
“This system works, so here I am back stronger than ever and with a team of volunteers. We’re going to gather information about ISIS controlled social media accounts and websites and publish it in a very large scale. We’re going to force these companies to remove this content by making them accountable,” he said.
At the beginning of the month, Twitter suspended the accounts of at least 2,000 accounts linked to IS and its supporters. This came as a result of the media coverage and increased user reports of policy violation for those profiles, according to ABC News.
Hundreds of volunteers helped with creating the list
Two other hacktivist groups, Anonymous and GhostSec, along with hundreds of volunteers joined this effort, resulting in the recently released list of Twitter profiles believed to be associated with the Islamic State extremist movement.
The current collection has been compiled by CtrlSec, and the end goal is to have all the accounts suspended by Twitter and impede IS from disseminating its propaganda and recruiting new members.
(xrsone) encourages anyone connected to the Internet to distribute the list in order to raise awareness and to put pressure on Twitter to remove the accounts.
The success of this sort of effort is uncertain at the moment, given that Twitter accounts can be created by anyone and that terrorist groups generally register a large number of profiles that promote each other in order to ensure long-term communication between members.