Twitter’s answer to international pressure; Company Suspended 166, 513 accounts for terrorism content in H2 2018

Brussels, May 10: Nowadays, Twitter is under immense international pressure due to extremist content. Taking steps on this issue, this micro-blogging site has suspended over 166,153 accounts in the second half of 2018.

Together with Facebook and Google, Twitter is under pressure and worldwide governments are also pressuring to remove extremist content speedily or get ready to face to heavy-headed legislation.

 

After announcing a new transparency policy, Twitter said, the suspended accounts are about a fifth less than in the previous period.

After announcing its latest transparency report, the company said, “Its technical tools were producing results, with 91% of accounts promoting terrorism content proactively suspended by its internal technology, the majority of which happened before their first tweet because the data used to set them upraised red flags”.

Twitter suspended 166,153 accounts between July and December last for promoting terrorism, a 19 percent drop from the 205,156 accounts suspended in the previous six months.

On this issue, Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s vice president for public policy said in an official statement, “This sharp decrease is indicative of a larger trend we are now observing — year-on-year the numbers of terrorist organizations attempting to use our service is reducing”.

She also added 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.