Twitter suspended an account belonging to an official al Qaida website Sunday, less than a week after it first went online.
The Arabic-language account, @shomokhalislam, went online on Sept. 24. The account belonged to the Shamukh al-Islam website, which is a members-only jihadist forum “used as an official clearing house for al Qaeda members to communicate and issue propaganda statements,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Its first posts “focused on divisions between two al Qaeda rebel groups in Syria, al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL),” the Free Beacon reported.
The Daily Mail reported that the account’s followers were “mostly journalists and curious onlookers,” but U.S. officials told the Free Beacon that “several high-profile digital jihadists” were also among its followers.
A Twitter spokesperson told The Daily Caller that the company doesn’t “comment on individual Twitter accounts, for security and privacy reasons.”
Twitter explains its reasons for suspending accounts in its “Twitter Rules” and its “Abusive behavior policy.”
The account represents the latest in a trend of terrorist groups using social media to spread propaganda, communicate and recruit.