Twitter today announced in its blog post about its Transparency Report, outlining several key interesting points. The social media giant gave us some interesting numbers regarding its actions against accounts that are linked to terrorism.
These accounts include those that “actively incite or promote violence associated with internationally recognized terrorist organizations, promote internationally recognized terrorist organizations, and accounts attempting to evade prior enforcement.”
In first half of this year, Twitter states that it has removed nearly 300,000 accounts that were suspected of terror-related activities and it also notes that 75 percent of them were taken down before they ever tweeted anything. It’s worth noting that this year’s account takedowns are down from the second half of 2016, which saw about 376,000 accounts taken down.
In addition to providing us some numbers, Twitter also highlights its own efforts in combatting terrorism-linked accounts, citing that 95 percent of account suspensions occurred through its own tools and algorithms. In terms of government-requested removals, they only accounted for less than one percent of resulting suspensions.
Twitter has been under a lot of scrutiny in recent years for not making additional efforts to stop terrorism-related activities on its platform. Many believe that the platform has helped with violence and extremism growth. Twitter says that since beginning of August, 2015 through June of this year, it has suspended 935,897 accounts that promoted terrorism.
