Twitter Cracks Down On ISIS-Linked Accounts With At Least 235,000 Recent Shutdowns

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Social media giant Twitter has continued its crackdown on accounts that “promote terrorism.” It’s an initiative that has seen hundreds of thousands of accounts suspended in this bid to greatly reduce the presence of the Islamic State and other groups using their service.

In February, Twitter announced that they had suspended over 125,000 accounts since mid-2015 for threatening on promoting terrorist attacks. Smash cut to today where Twitter has proclaimed that they’ve since suspended 235,000 more accounts for violating “policies related to promotion of terrorism” since February which brings the grand total to 360,000 suspended accounts since mid-2015.

The data presented by Twitter shows that daily suspensions are up 80 percent versus last year with activity of this nature spiking following terror incidents. Twitter also declared that the “response time for suspending reported accounts, the amount of time these accounts are on Twitter, and the number of followers they accumulate have all decreased dramatically.” Despite their reported success, the internet goliath notes that handling pro-terror accounts does not come with a one-strategy-fits-all solution.

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. In fact, over the past six months these tools have helped us to automatically identify more than one third of the accounts we ultimately suspended for promoting terrorism. We will continue to invest in both technology and other resources in the future and you can expect us to update our progress regularly as part of our Transparency Report beginning in 2017.

Twitter, a company previously under scrutiny for not doing enough to combat the presence of terror groups on their service, has clearly made strides in changing how they operate. Of course, as Twitter changes, so will the tactics of individuals and groups that want to use the service for their own means. It will be up to Twitter to meet that challenge.

(Via Washington Post)

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