Since the so-called Islamic State first began its rampage of terror throughout the Middle East and abroad, ordinary people around the world have offered up their time and skill sets to help destroy it. Some have volunteered to face the group in battle alongside Kurdish peshmerga forces in northern Iraq. Others have risked their lives to smuggle captives out of the ISIS stronghold of Mosul. And countless more have taken to social media to engage the group’s sympathizers in heated debate.
Two months ago, a “hactivist” with the hacker collective Anonymous, who goes by the handle WauchulaGhost on Twitter, decided to try another tactic: flood the Twitter accounts of ISIS supporters with porn, reports The Washington Post.
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Ghost’s strategy is as simple as it is brilliant. He hacks into the Twitter accounts of ISIS supporters and then uses those accounts to blast provocative photos across the internet. For ISIS’ propaganda wing, this is extremely counterproductive, as the group uses social media to advertise the terrorist group’s ultra-conservative way of life, as well as inspire “lone wolves” like Omar Mir Seddique Mateen, who carried out the recent attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, to murder innocent people in the name of its perverse interpretation of Islam, which denounces homosexuality but encourages followers to force women and children into sexual slavery.
“[ISIS] doesn’t like porn,” Ghost told The Washington Post in an interview. “They don’t like women in general. We just started using it to poke fun at them and diminish their presence online.”
Since its conception, internet porn has served as a source of private enjoyment for millions — if not billions — of people around the world. But here’s the thing: ISIS doesn’t like porn. In fact, they despise it, just like they despite virtually everything else that makes life on Earth anything but completely unbearable. Needless to say, the ISIS supporters haven’t taken too kindly to Ghost’s shenanigans. But he could care less.
“My goal waking up in the morning and see messages from [ISIS], telling me they’re going to kill me or cut my head off,” Ghost told The Washington Post. “The madder they get, the happier I get.”
While part of the fun of exploiting ISIS Twitter accounts is pissing them off, the real goal, Ghost explains, is to “diminish their presence online” by drawing enough negative attention to those accounts so they’ll be shut down. The fewer ISIS accounts, the less chance there is of people being exposed to their propaganda, or so the logic goes. Although, Ghost’s tactic does indeed increase the likelihood of those people being exposed to a picture of a naked woman, but that’s a risk he’s willing to take.
According to The Washington Post, Ghost has hacked about 160 accounts, replacing many of their profile avatars with “I porn.” Most of those accounts have already been shut down, but there’s always more work to be done. Following the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which killed scores of innocent people, Anonymous swore revenge on ISIS and launched a campaign to attack the group on multiple cyber fronts.
Now, after Orlando, Ghost is ramping up his own efforts to rein in ISIS’ cyber influence, because he’s convinced not enough is being done through official channels.
“The government really hasn’t been doing enough, especially on social media,” Ghost told The Washington Post. “You see the beheading images everywhere. Kids get online and shouldn’t see the images.”