Twitter, through an official blog post, revealed that it has suspended 235,000 terrorism-linked accounts on the social media platform over the past six months.
The announcement was a follow-up to a post from February, wherein Twitter reported that it had shut down 125,000 such accounts since the middle of last year.
With the new suspensions, the total number of accounts that Twitter has shut down for violating the social media network's policies against the promotion of terrorism is now up to 360,000. According to Twitter, numerous third parties have noted that the efforts of Twitter have led to meaningful results, which includes the shift of terrorism-related activities off of the platform.
Twitter also noted that the daily suspension rate is up by more than 80 percent compared with last year, with spikes in suspensions seen immediately after terrorist attacks. The network's response time in the suspension of reported terrorism-related accounts, the time that these accounts are active on Twitter, and the number of followers that the accounts are able to accumulate before being suspended have all dramatically decreased.
The social media platform also said that it has improved its ability to prevent suspended users from immediately creating new accounts, while also expanding the teams that go through the reports for possible suspensions, along with their tools and languages handled. Twitter also collaborates with other online platforms to share information and processes for the identification and removal of terrorist content.
Kronos Advisory principal Michael Smith II noticed around June that changes had come to Twitter, as the platform became faster in identifying and taking down accounts that were promoting content related to terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.
However, Smith added that Twitter needs to do more. Examples of accounts that need to be taken down are those of Anjem Choudary, a radical cleric who was jailed after encouraging Britons to join the Islamic State, and of two clerics in Jordan related to the al Qaeda, Abu Qatadah and Muhammad al-Maqdisi.
Tech entrepreneur and activist Anil Dash, meanwhile, claimed that while the actions of Twitter have led to the takedown of content and suspension of accounts related to extremist content, the moves do not solve the underlying abuse issues of the social media platform. Users are still able to carry out actions that can put other users at risk, including publishing personal information of others that can be used for illegal purposes.
Twitter has been doing the things that it has announced for a long time, Dash noted, and it can be seen that most of the topics and developments that the social media platform discussed in the new blog post are similar to what it reported back in February.
