ISIS has already broadly threatened the United States for its airstrikes against the group, infamously killing two American journalists, and threatening to behead a British citizen for the United Kingdom's participation in the efforts to stem ISIS's growth.
However, as Vocative reports, the group is now threatening employees of the social media site Twitter, which has been (somewhat half-heartedly) engaged in the monitoring and closing down of the accounts of ISIS fighters:
The call for retribution against the online platform was first announced Sunday night in a series of tweets asking “lone wolves” in the U.S. and Europe to make Twitter employees the focus of their attacks."
Here is a translation of a tweet from a since-banned Twitter account, which employed a specific hashtag in its repeated calls for violence.
“#The_Concept_of_Lone_Wolf_Attacks The time has arrived to respond to Twitter’s management by directly attacking their employees and physically assassinating them!! Those who will carry this out are the sleepers cells of death.”
Writing in Politico, Jacob Silverman outlined how the group uses Twitter and other social media sites to recruit new members, boast of its activities, and make ISIS-related hashtags trend. By and large, Twitter hasn't been able (or perhaps hasn't chosen) to do much about it:
Yet in the days after [James] Foley’s death, something strange happened: very little at all. The video was released on a Tuesday. By Friday, many IS supporters had reappeared on Twitter under new or similar account names — some even bragged about dodging Twitter’s censors. Many of them were defending Foley’s murder or pointed to what they saw as Western hypocrisy over the apparent belief that graphic footage of one American mattered more than the gory photos and videos they had been posting for months."
According to the SFGate, Twitter hasn't revealed whether it's beefing up its security, telling the paper, the “security team is investigating the veracity of these threats with relevant law enforcement officials.”