Terrorism on Twitter: Social Media Site Removes Around 300,000 Accounts That Promotes Terror
Twitter announced that they shut down almost 300,000 accounts that are linked with terrorism during the first half of 2017.
In the social media company's transparency report that was posted on Tuesday, Sept. 19, Twitter revealed that about 95 percent of the suspended accounts were discovered by their internal tools that are used to determine spam.
According to a report, the tools that they used can be considered faster and more efficient in determining terrorism-promoting accounts compared to human users or reviewers by up to 74 percent in the last six months. It also mentioned that about 75 percent of the accounts had been shut down even before it can post its first tweet online.
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On the other hand, the microblogging site based in San Francisco, California also mentioned that less than two percent of suspended accounts were reported by governments from different parts of the world. According to the company, as much as 716 separate reports had been submitted by various governments. This led to the removal of a total of 5,929 accounts.
In a blog post, the company explained their definition of accounts that promote terrorism.
"Under this category of reports, we are referring to accounts that actively incite or promote violence associated with internationally recognized terrorist organizations, promote internationally recognized terrorist organizations, and accounts attempting to evade prior enforcement," the company stated.
The company also revealed that they have already taken down a total of 935, 897 accounts for promoting terrorism since August 1, 2015, until June 30, 2017.
Aside from Twitter, other social media companies such as Facebook and YouTube as well as tech giant Microsoft reportedly agreed to build a shared database that will be composed of digital fingerprints of the terrorism-laden contents that were removed from their websites. This could help them determine which contents should be blocked from sharing on the Internet.
Twitter currently has 328 million users as stated by its second-quarter earnings report that was posted on July 2017.
