According to the filed complaint documents, as of early November – the time of Fields’ death – ISIS had close to 70,000 active accounts on Twitter and posted at a rate of 90 tweets per minute.
This is not the first concern that has been raise. The complaint cites the FBI’s statements that “ISIS has perfected it’s use of Twitter to inspire small-scale individual attacks and to crowdsource terrorism and sell murder.”
The complaint also states the official ISIS public relations group, Al-Hayat Media Center, has at least six accounts dedicated to recruiting Westerners, specifically. Photos, cartoons, tweets, and other propaganda were pulled from the accounts and included in the court filing documents.
When approached regarding this growing concern, back in 2014, Twitter founder Biz Stone replied to inquiries regarding the use of Twitter to further ISIS’s reach and publicize acts of terrorism:
“If you want to create a platform that allows for the freedom of expression for hundreds of millions of people around the world, you really have to take the good with the bad,” stated Stone, defending the platform and the rights of ISIS members.
