Twitter suspends 166,000 accounts in battle against online terrorism
Twitter suspended more than 166,000 accounts in the last six months of 2018, it revealed today, as it makes progress on battling terrorism on its platform.
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The number of users banned from the social network amounted to a 19 per cent drop from the first half of the year when it blocked 205,156 accounts, it said.
“We believe this reflects the effectiveness of our proprietary technology in proactively identifying and challenging accounts at scale,” Twitter said.
The tech giant added that its software spotted 91 per cent of the 166,153 accounts suspended between July and December.
Chief executive Jack Dorsey’s company, as well as other tech behemoths like Google and Facebook, face increasing scrutiny from regulators to tackle extremist content and hate speech.
Facebook banned far-right figures like ex-Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos and Info Wars host Alex Jones last week, accusing them of spreading hate and praising others who do.
Videos of the recently New Zealand Christchurch shootings that resulted in 50 deaths emerged on social media, with a gunman streaming it all to Facebook.
Meanwhile Dorsey has recently confessed his platform must “do a better job generally in removing hate and harassment”.
“This sharp decrease is indicative of a larger trend we are now observing — year-on-year the numbers of terrorist organisations attempting to use our service is reducing,” Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s vice president for public policy told Reuters.
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“This can be attributed to a robust technical approach that we’ve enhanced over many years. We are encouraged by these metrics but will remain vigilant.”