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Twitter Is Banning Anonymous Hackers for Harassing ISIS Members

Anonymous members are angry at the social media platform

Mar 7, 2016 16:23 GMT  ·  By
Anonymous members take a jab at Twitter's silly policies
   Anonymous members take a jab at Twitter's silly policies

A tweet from a disgruntled Anonymous hacktivist has just gone viral, and the hacker is accusing Twitter of protecting ISIS terrorists as part of their "no bullying" campaign by suspending Anonymous accounts that report ISIS Twitter profiles on a too frequent basis.

Ever since the Charlie Hebdo attacks from early 2015, Anonymous hackers have been waging cyber-war against ISIS terrorists, an initiative that intensified tenfolds last November after the brutal Paris attacks.

While sometimes the group has taken down ISIS sites via DDoS attacks, most of the time, the group has been sabotaging ISIS' online presence by reporting their Twitter or Facebook accounts and having them taken down.

Twitter took down 125,000 ISIS accounts

In fact, the hacker collective group has been so efficient at its job that Twitter announced at the middle of February that it took down more than 125,000 ISIS-related Twitter accounts. But as one of the Anonymous hackers explains, it's exactly this announcement that has annoyed the group's members.

In a message posted on his Twitter account (see the first tweet below the article), Wauchula Ghost, a former GhostSec member and current Anonymous affiliate, says that Twitter actually took credit for Anonymous' work while also sabotaging their efforts.

As the hacker explains, Twitter is slow to react to takedown notices for ISIS accounts, often requiring more than twenty such reports for an account to be taken down, and numerous times, the social network has been taking down Anonymous accounts as well.

In an interview with Epoch Times, Wauchula Ghost is saying that this might be because of Twitter's newly announced anti-harassment policy. He says that Twitter is mislabeling their takedown reports against ISIS accounts as online bullying and banning its members instead.

Twitter is cutting the branch from under its feet

Even his account was among those that got taken down, and he says that Twitter didn't even bother to let him know why he had his profile suspended.

In his case, a quick response from the community, which quickly and fervently tweeted at Twitter's support staff managed to get his profile reinstated, but there are countless other accounts that weren't.

The reason for the hacker's public outrage against Twitter is the fact that the company seems to revel in the positive public image, which comes with being an active anti-ISIS fighter, but it's not really doing "any" of the work. Even worse, the company seems to avoid any type of collaboration with the Anonymous group.

Taking into account that Twitter made its "125,000 ISIS accounts taken down" announcement only a month after a Florida woman sued the company for giving ISIS a platform for their propaganda, Anonymous is hinting at the fact that Twitter is not really dedicated to taking down ISIS accounts at all.