Twitter is at the target of a new lawsuit by a widow, whose husband was killed at a police training center in Jordan. The widow has accused the micro-blogging company of letting the Islamic State make use of its service for spreading terrorist message while being fully aware of it, says a report from Bloomberg.
Twitter doing it knowingly?
The lawsuit filed on Wednesday, in San Francisco federal court, stated that a ‘lone wolf’ attack took place in November at a police training center in Amman in which five were killed including Lloyd ‘Carl’ Fields Jr. Tamara Fields – the widow – has complained that Twitter lets ISIS make use of its platform knowingly.
“Without Twitter, the explosive growth of ISIS over the last few years into the most-feared terrorist group in the world would not have been possible,” the complaint read. Twitter provides material support to terrorism, according to Fields, who now seeks compensatory damages and a ruling that the company is violating the federal Anti-terrorism Act.
In an e-mail too Bloomberg, the micro-blogging firm said it believes the lawsuit is without merit, but also expressed grief on hearing about the family’s terrible loss. “Violent threats and the promotion of terrorism deserve no place on Twitter and, like other social networks, our rules make that clear,” the email read.
Use of social media sites for spreading terror
Twitter is very popular among the terrorist group – ISIS – for spreading terror via sharing videos of beheading and issuing threats by its leaders. ISIS use the platform for hiring as well. These terrorists make use of almost all the other social media sites, who are constantly under pressure from both government and public of quickly removing the terrorist’s posts including the ones from ISIS.
Though Twitter does a good job removing such posts and deleting the related accounts, the new ones spring up quickly with the same propaganda and messages. Last week, Obama administration made an announcement regarding the creation of a task force to help keep extremist groups away from misusing social media.
Several Internet companies including Twitter are involved in a battle with the U.S. Justice Department over spy agency requests for user data.
In its biannual transparency report, the micro-blogging firm mentioned that from January to June 2015, it received 1003 global content removal requests and complied with 42% of those. The U.S. government and law enforcement agencies made 25 of those requests, and Twitter said it didn’t comply with any of those.
