Twitter suspends 235,000 accounts for promoting terrorism

Earlier this year, Twitter had announced that more than 125,000 accounts were suspended since mid-2015 for violating its longtime prohibition on violent threats and the promotion of terrorism.

“We strongly condemn these acts and remain committed to eliminating the promotion of violence or terrorism on our platform.”

“Today we are announcing that we have suspended an additional 235,000 accounts for violating our policies related to promotion of terrorism in the six months since our February 2016 post,” the statement added.

 

This brings our overall number of suspensions to 360,000 since the middle of 2015. “Daily suspensions are up over 80 percent since last year, with spikes in suspensions immediately following terrorist attacks.

Pro-ISIS group berates supporters for leaving the ‘Twitter battlefield’ https://t.co/EsOvJpD9vO pic.twitter.com/6EHCTbZZzX

— Vocativ (@vocativ) July 27, 2016

Our 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.”

At least hundreds and probably thousands of ISIS Twitter accounts suspended in last 24 hours, many key users within minutes of creating. — J.M. Berger (@intelwire) June 18, 2016

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.