Al-Shabaab is now on their sixth Twitter account. Past suspensions included posting pictures of a murdered French special ops soldier, but most of the time they were able to get away with posting their threats and gloats of jihad, including a July claim (repeated occasionally afterward) that it killed two Americans working as CIA contractors.
As the Westgate mall attacks unfolded last weekend, Kenyans and well-wishers from across the globe deluged the Twitter complaint line with calls to take the account of the terrorists down. Al-Shabaab was gleefully tweeting gruesome accounts from its operation, and threatening even more violence.
Every time Twitter takes down Al-Shabaab’s account they start a new one, and after a few rotations of this it seems their latest account has been allowed to stand. It’s been up for a few days, has 51 tweets and 5,245 followers (probably half of them media, like yours truly) and is not only mocking the terrorist attack but threatening more.
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