Twitter took to its blog to announce that it has taken down about 125,000 accounts which were used to promote terrorism, since the middle of 2015.
Since mid-2015, we have suspended over 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts. Read more here: https://t.co/FQJeOTtPLz
— Policy (@policy) February 5, 2016
The company announced that most of these accounts were linked to ISIS. The terrorist outfit has been using social media and instant messaging platforms such as Telegram to recruit people for its causes.
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.
Twitter also says that it has increased the number of people who scrutinize the reports, which, they say, has brought down their response time significantly. The company says that this has brought about results already, with this type of activity moving off the platform.
We have increased the size of the teams that review reports, reducing our response time significantly. We also look into other accounts similar to those reported and leverage proprietary spam-fighting tools to surface other potentially violating accounts for review by our agents.
Twitter has also been cooperating with law enforcement agencies “when appropriate.” Twitter also notes that it’s very difficult to detect these accounts automatically, but it also vows to work with what reports it gets to enforce the rules of the platform and to work with the appropriate authorities.
As many experts and other companies have noted, there is no “magic algorithm” for identifying terrorist content on the internet, so global online platforms are forced to make challenging judgement calls based on very limited information and guidance. In spite of these challenges, we will continue to aggressively enforce our Rules in this area, and engage with authorities and other relevant organizations to find solutions to this critical issue and promote powerful counter-speech narratives.
Twitter clearly has its work cut out, trying to weed out these promoters of “violent extremism.”
[button link=”https://blog.twitter.com/2016/combating-violent-extremism” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Twitter[/button]
