Twitter Suspends 166,000 Accounts For Terrorism

Twitter has revealed its latest efforts to improve the overall environment on the microblogging platform through its policing methods.

Twitter published its latest Transparency Report, in which it revealed it had suspended 166,513 accounts for the promotion of terrorism.

The efforts to improve the Twitter environment comes after the co-founder and CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, admitted last month he wanted move the platform “away from outrage and mob behaviour and towards productive, healthy conversation.”

Terrorism takedowns

And in its latest transparency report, the firm revealed its efforts in this report during the last six month of 2018, between July and December 2018.

Twitter has been releasing Transparency reports ever since 2012.

“During this reporting period, Twitter suspended 166,513 unique accounts for violations related to promotion of terrorism,” Twitter said. “We surfaced for review 91 percent of the unique accounts suspended using our internal, proprietary tools.”

“While this total number of unique accounts suspended during the reporting period has decreased 19 percent since the previous reporting period, we believe this reflects the effectiveness of our proprietary technology in proactively identifying and challenging accounts at scale,” it added.

CEO Dorsey has previously made clear that Twitter’s use of AI is paying off in helping it clamp down on abuse for example.

Twitter’s transparency report also revealed other interesting data, including the number of takedown requests it receives from governments and law enforcement agencies around the world.

Government requests

Twitter said it had “received roughly 8 percent fewer global legal demands, impacting approximately 2 percent fewer accounts, compared to the previous reporting period.”

However, it did note that there was an 84 percent increase year-over-year between 2017 and 2018, impacting 114 percent more accounts.

It said that “74 percent of the total global volume of requests originated from only two countries: Russia and Turkey.”

As far back as 2012, Twitter management had pledged to clampdown on the ‘horrific’ problem of online trolling, bullying and abuse.

To help matters Twitter in 2013 introduced the “report abuse” button where people could manually report ‘abusive’ tweets.

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