JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A local woman fears for her safety after she said strange, degrading and terroristic tweets began popping up on her Twitter account.
The woman, who only wishes to be identified as Kaleigh, said the tweets started showing up Tuesday morning.
After several making attempts to have them taken down, Kaleigh told News4Jax Friday that the tweets were taken down from her account.
Kaleigh said she hadn’t used Twitter in several months and did not even notice the tweets until her friends started texting her, sending her screenshots of the posts.
“This is the first one that was posted at 4 a.m. on Tuesday, July 12. And this one was, I think, about 5 a.m. on July 12. And then it stopped,” Kaleigh said.
The pain caused by the tweets is still very real for Kaleigh. She told News4Jax Thursday that she’s been crying a lot the past two days.
“I want them to delete the account completely. I don’t want to (be) associated with Twitter at all. Just the way they’ve handled this whole thing, it upsets me a lot,” Kaleigh said. “I’m just choked up.”
On Tuesday, when the tweets were first posted, Kaleigh said, she did everything she could to get into the account. But she believes the email and password were changed.
“Twitter has a customer service and it says if you think you got hacked, you should basically talk to these people. But then it just turns into a circle of robots and webpages and stuff. So you don’t get to talk to a person. I kept filing cases,” Kaleigh said.
The tweets included things like her IP address and location. They also called her vulgar words and posted a video showing what looks like a beheading.
One of the tweets says, “This is my phone number if you want to call me. I’ll be waiting for you, come and rape me.”
Kaleigh said the phone number isn’t hers, but the message is sickening.
“Hopefully they don’t do it to anyone else again. It’s very upsetting. The things they’ve said about me, the things they’ve posted. It’s upset a lot of people. I just want them to stop doing it,” Kaleigh said.
Newsweek reported similar photos were posted to Taylor Swift’s Twitter account last year, as well as the news organization’s own account. According to Newsweek, Twitter managed to take them down within 14 minutes of them being posted.
Twitter said it has a strict policy when it comes to extremists on social media, saying, “Since the middle of 2015 alone, we’ve suspended over 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS. We condemn the use of Twitter to promote terrorism and the Twitter rules make it clear that this type of behavior, or any violent threat, is not permitted on our service.”
News4Jax emailed Twitter Thursday asking for a comment but has not yet heard back.
