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Twitter has revealed\u00a0it suspended\u00a0a total of\u00a0376,890 accounts between\u00a0July 1 through December 31 last year for violations related to promotion of terrorism. It says the majority of the suspensions (74 percentage) were surfaced via its own \u201cinternal, proprietary spam-fighting tools.\u201d<\/p>\n
The figures are revealed in a new section<\/a> of\u00a0its biannual Transparency Report<\/a>, which also details government requests to remove content deemed to be promoting terrorism and thus in violation of Twitter\u2019s Terms of Service.<\/p>\n Government TOS requests pertaining to terrorism represented less than 2 percent of all account suspensions in the reported time period, with Twitter saying it received 716 reports, covering 5,929 accounts, and deemed 85 percent to be in violation.<\/p>\n Twitter also notes\u00a0that it suspended a total of\u00a0636,248 accounts over\u00a0the period of August 1, 2015 through December 31, 2016, and adds\u00a0that it will be sharing \u201cfuture updates on our efforts to combat violent extremism by including them in this new section of our transparency report.\u201d<\/p>\n Twitter has previously said\u00a0125,000 accounts<\/a> were suspended for promoting terrorism between mid-2015 and early 2016 \u2014 and a further\u00a0235,000<\/a> suspensions were made for this reason in the six months after that, to August 2016.<\/p>\n In December<\/a> last year Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook and YouTube\u00a0also announced a collaboration on a shared industry database aimed at identifying terrorist content spreading across their respective platforms to speed up takedowns.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s fair to say that the\u00a0issue of terrorist takedowns is\u00a0just the tip of the political iceberg that has crashed into social media giants in recent times.<\/p>\n Twitter and Facebook, for example, have\u00a0come\u00a0under increasing pressure to do more to combat trolling, \u201cfake news\u201d and hate speech circulating on their\u00a0platforms, especially in the wake of the U.S. election last year \u2014 when commentators criticized social media companies\u00a0of skewing political discourse by incentivizing the sharing of misinformation and enabling the propagation\u00a0of far right extremist views.<\/p>\n There is a disturbance in the political bot-troll universe. A bunch of them being revived. Hmmm. Which election\/event, I do wonder?<\/p>\n \u2014 Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) December 21, 2016<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n Twitter\u2019s\u00a0response to criticism of how it handles accounts that are doling out abuse in tweet-form\u00a0has so\u00a0far included\u00a0updating its abuse policy<\/a> and adding more muting\/filtering tools for users. Although\u00a0last month<\/a> it ended up rolling back some additional\u00a0anti-abuse measures\u00a0after they were criticized by users.<\/p>\n It\u00a0also continues to be\u00a0called out for failing to combat botnets<\/a> \u2014 such as those\u00a0working to amplify far-right political views<\/a>\u00a0via the use of automated spam tactics.<\/p>\n On the\u00a0issue of political bot-troll armies, it\u2019s fair to say Twitter appears far more agnostic\/less interested in taking a stand. A study by two U.S. universities last month suggested 15 percent of Twitter accounts are bots<\/a> \u2014 which gives the veteran \u201cpro-free speech\u201d company a pretty sizable reason\u00a0to tread carefully here.<\/p>\n And with user growth an ongoing problem for Twitter, it\u2019s hardly going to be keen to\u00a0nix\u00a0millions of robot accounts. (Plus, of course, not all bots are seeking to subvert democracy \u2014 even if\u00a0some demonstrably are<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n