A top Taliban spokesman might be on the hunt for a new hiding spot after his technical skills failed him to accidentally reveal his location in a series of geo-tagged tweets to nearly 6,000 followers last week, Quartz reported. In August, the member had announced that he would be able to communicate via Viber, WhatsApp and WeChat.
Zabiullah Mujahid, a longtime spokesman for the Afghan group, tweeted at least three times over the course of two days last week. The spokesman, however, accidentally forgot to disable Twitter's automatically-built in location identification system before posting the series of tweets.
But surprise, surprise. Instead of being located in Afghanistan, known to be the terrorist group's homeland, Mujahid was situated in Sindh, a Pakistani region in the southeast of the country, the Daily Caller reported.
"I'm pretty sure this is a one-off with regards to the Middle East," Eliot Higgins, a blogger who frequently analyzes photos and videos posted from conflict zones, told WorldViews.
Mujahid was quick to deny the allegations that he was in Pakistan, deeming the geo-location to be part of an "enemy plot."
"Theoretically, Mujahid could also have used technology which hides a user's real location and places him in other countries. This, however, would lead to new questions: Why would someone who puts so much effort into hiding deliberately decide to turn on Twitter's location tracking?" according to the Washington Post.
"According to Twitter, location services are usually turned 'off by default and [one] will need to opt-in to use it.' Twitter furthermore urges its users to be careful about sharing their locations. 'There may be some updates where you want to keep your location private,' the company recommends in its FAQs."
Social media has a tendency of outing locations of people who wish to remain hidden. Earlier this summer, a series of location-tagged posts on Instagram helped BuzzFeed reveal that multiple Russian soldiers were operating from inside Ukraine.
Since Taliban's account @alemarahweb, which used to tweet regularly, no longer exists, the Quartz reports that multiple individuals could be involved in maintaining Mujahid's account.
Here's one of them, with his back turned to the camera, speaking to CNN in 2009:
