The Islamic militant group ISIL is using its own Twitter application to keep jihadists all over the world updated on its terror efforts in Iraq and Syria.
Hundreds of users have signed up for Dawn, or The Dawn of Glad Tidings, through the Google Play store since its inception in April. Its posting activity has ramped up since ISIL captured the northern Iraqi city of Mosul last week, The Atlantic reported.
“Once you sign up, the app will post tweets to your account — the content of which is decided by someone in ISIS’s social-media operation,” The Atlantic reported. “The tweets include links, hashtags, and images, and the same content is also tweeted by the accounts of everyone else who has signed up for the app, spaced out to avoid triggering Twitter’s spam-detection algorithms. Your Twitter account functions normally the rest of the time, allowing you to go about your business.”
The app has been so successful with Twitter that “the (ISIL) hashtag consistently outperforms that of the group’s main competitor in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, even though the two groups have a similar number of supporters online.”
ISIL used the app on Saturday to post grisly photos of an alleged mass killing of Iraqi soldiers. As the militants marched toward Baghdad on Sunday, Dawn users began sending thousands of tweets featuring an image of a jihadist gazing at the ISIL flag flying over the city, with the text, “We are coming, Baghdad,” The Atlantic reported.
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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