Twitter Suspends 235,000 Accounts for Promoting Extremism
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Twitter has suspended 235,000 accounts for promoting terrorism and violent extremism over the last six months. This represents a marked increase compared to the 125,000 accounts it suspended in the second half of 2015, bringing the total up to 360,000.
The action is an indication that Twitter has been ramping up its efforts to enforce standards of conduct on its micro-blogging site, after it attracted criticism for rampant bullying, sexual harassment and racism.
Historically, Twitter has struggled to strike an uneasy balance between its role as a bastion of free speech and offering protections to women and other vulnerable groups on the social platform. The company has preferred to adopt a laissez-faire approach in filtering content, usually relying on user-driven flagging to identify posts for removal, a move which has failed to satisfy those calling for more active policing of bullying and harassment.
On the other hand, Twitter has been much less equivocal about harboring terrorist propaganda, The New York Times reports. Twitter has expanded its team responsible for reviewing and suspending accounts and has partnered with groups working to limit the dissemination of extremism online. Daily suspension rates for violating Twitter’s policy on terrorist content have risen dramatically by 80% since last year.
Twitter, in its blog post announcing the uptick in suspensions, noted that there was no formula used to identify terrorist content and that it relied on a combination of measures: “As we mentioned in February, and other companies and experts have also noted, there is no one ‘magic algorithm’ for identifying terrorist content on the Internet. But we continue to utilize other forms of technology, like proprietary spam-fighting tools, to supplement reports from our users and help identify repeat account abuse.”
