An Anonymous-affiliated hacker is doing his part to honor the victims of the last weekend’s mass shooting in Orlando by breaking into pro-ISIS Twitter accounts and giving them new, rainbow-tinted themes.
Gone are the messages supporting Omar Mateen and images of the ISIS flag. In their place are loving new bios, prideful profile pics, and slogans like “I’m Gay and I’m Proud,” “Out and Proud,” and “LGBTQ Pride Month.” The hacker WauchulaGhost, who’s been altering the Twitter accounts of ISIS sympathizers for months, is the mastermind behind the effort. He says he noticed celebrations of the Orlando shooting among the users he watches and attacked the only way he knows how.
“I did it for the lives lost in Orlando,” WauchulaGhost told Newsweek. “Daesh [ISIS] have been spreading and praising the attack, so I thought I would defend those that were lost. The taking of innocent lives will not be tolerated.”
WauchulaGhost says his social-media campaign against ISIS has resulted in the takeover of some 200 accounts, many of which have been deleted by Twitter. On Tuesday, he suggested that Twitter is stalking him, because the moment he hacked an account, it was suspended. The social-media company is indeed on a mission to rid itself of terrorism. A spokesperson told CBS the company has deleted 125,000 accounts “for threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS.”
WauchulaGhost sees himself as something of a vigilante crime fighter, and with Twitter seemingly relying on his ability to unearth ISIS members so it can delete their accounts, he’s clearly having an impact. But for him, as he told the Washington Post, that’s only part of the mission. “My goal waking up in the morning [is to] see messages from Daesh, telling me they’re going to kill me or cut my head off. The madder they get, the happier I get.”