The man, an Iraqi-born Irish citizen in his 20s, was working on Facebook’s counter-terrorism team in Dublin, Ireland. As an Arabic speaker, he was part of a 40-strong team responsible for monitoring and removing content that breached the social media giant’s terms of service.

Speaking to the Guardian, the unnamed man said: “[When] you have people like that knowing your family name you know that people get butchered for that.

“The punishment from IS [Islamic State, formerly ISIS/ISIL] for working in counter-terrorism is beheading.”

The lapse was discovered in November last year, when a bug in the software was found to put the personal information of moderators in the activity log of the Facebook groups targeted for breaching the terms of service. In groups whose administrators had been removed, the remaining admins were free to view the moderators’ details.

The man, who came to Ireland as an asylum seeker, left the country for Eastern Europe after learning that his profile had been viewed by an Egypt-based group he’d removed over its support of Hamas and Islamic State.

“It was getting too dangerous to stay in Dublin,” he said.

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