Middle Eastern terrorist organisation the Islamic State (IS) is apparently concerned about the large number of Twitter accounts purporting to represent the caliphate.
The group clarified that only a handful of accounts are authorised to speak for IS, and the organisation's leader and spokesman do not have Twitter accounts.
"The Caliph Abu Baker Al Baghdadi and Shaykh Abu Mohammad al-Adnani al-Shami do not have accounts on social media," read a translation obtained by Fox News.
"No one has the right to speak on behalf of the Islamic State or its Emir or its spokesperson."
The statement may be in response to confusion over the status of IS hostages in past weeks. Death videos were released after an allegedly IS-affiliated account tweeted that some of their hostages had already been killed, and the videos did not include a reference to Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasaesbeh.
"They have problems with leaks, like other organisations, from time to time, so it is not surprising they appear to be trying to maintain message control," Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies explained.
"The Islamic State has a protocol for releasing statements, and anything that doesn't come through the approved channels hasn't been blessed by the organisation at the highest levels," he continued.
"It doesn't mean what comes out through non-official channels is wrong, just that it hasn't been cleared for release."
A social media expert told Congress on Tuesday that the Islamic State has over 45,000 Twitter accounts to attract followers from around the globe.
After the execution video of journalist James Foley was spread across Twitter, the social network stepped up its methods of detecting and suspending accounts that promoted terrorism.
Nearly 18,000 IS-related accounts have been suspended since the fall.
