Nohemi Gonzalez, 26, was killed by ISIS in the Paris November 2015 terror attacks that killed 130. In March 2016, Alexander Pinczowski, 29, and his sister Sascha Pinczowski, 26, were killed by an ISIS suicide bomber at the Brussels Airport.
These attacks were facilitated by ISIS being able to use Twitter, says Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Director of the Tel Aviv-based Shurat HaDin legal rights organization. The organization assisted the victims in filing a lawsuit against Twitter on their behalf.
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner said “This is the first lawsuit to document Twitter’s key role in the rise of ISIS to become the most feared terrorist organization in the world.” She said that the lawsuit's purpose is also “to detail how ISIS used Twitter specifically in connection with two of the worst terror attacks in Europe’s recent history.” The lawsuit claims that ISIS used Twitter “as a weapon of terror, including through ‘bots,’ special apps and ‘hashtag hijacking’ to inflate its image, recruit members and grow into the most-feared terrorist organization in the world.”
ISIS has also used other social media to achieve their aims but when called to task many heeded the call and cut off services to them as Facebook recently did to Hamas much to their chagrin. However, out of all the social media platforms “Twitter has most brazenly refused to cut off its services to terrorists, taking the position that ‘the tweets must flow’ even if it means assisting in mass murders,” according to Darshan-Leitner.
The lawsuit “reveals direct connections between Twitter and terror, and when justice is done in this case, it will force Twitter and others to conclude that supporting terror does not pay,” says Darshan-Leitner.
We hope she is successful and that terror won’t be assisted by insensitive social media organizations who are accomplices to this insanity.