Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed Thursday that his employees have been receiving threats of being assassinated by ISIS.
The death threats were discussed in an interview with Aspen Institute's Walter Isaacson at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, where Costolo talked about the Jihadist militant group using the social network to spread its message, according to CNET.
The CEO said that while Twitter and other social networks have positive uses, they can also be uses for "nefarious purposes." As a result, Twitter has been removing ISIS's accounts, citing them as violating the company's terms of service. He added that the group has sent him and all of his employees threats after their accounts were shut down.
"After regularly suspending their accounts, which we've been doing, some folks affiliated with the organization used Twitter to declare that the employees of Twitter and the management of Twitter should be assassinated. Obviously, that's a jarring thing for anyone to have to deal with. And I've spent a lot of time talking to the company about it," said Costolo.
Costolo said posts such as those made by ISIS are "against our terms of service," and that they are not allowed to promote their organization on Twitter in many of the countries that the service is available in, The Independent reported.
"And when we do find those accounts we shut them down," he said. "We shut them down quite actively."
Another point Costolo brought up in the interview was the issue of maintaining the right to free speech for users when some of them post tweets with negative or hostile intent.
"I was always asked, 'How are you going to balance the needs of your business against the rights of your users and the desire to promote open speech?'" he said. "The reality is almost never about a debate between the needs of the business and the needs of one group of users. It is almost always a debate [with] two different perspectives about a piece of speech."
