Twitter Inc. said on Thursday that it has suspended 235,000 terrorist-related accounts over the last six months, almost double as many as in the previous period, reflecting stepped up efforts to curb the proliferation of extremist content on the social media site.
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Daily suspensions of accounts are up more than 80 percent since past year, and spike in the immediate aftermath of attacks claimed by militant groups, Twitter said in a statement posted on its blog.
Twitter also acknowledged that it is working with entities funded by governments in the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, France to identify and shut down accounts – a move likely to trigger accusations of censorship.
CNBC reports that a total of 360,000 accounts have been suspended since the middle of 2015.
Twitter has been under pressure to balance protecting free speech at the service with not providing a stage for terrorist groups to spread violent messages and enlist people to their causes.
“Since that announcement, the world has witnessed a further wave of deadly, abhorrent terror attacks across the globe”, Twitter said.
Twitter, which says on its site that it has 313 million monthly active users, has long struggled with controlling terrorism-linked accounts on its platform, especially with the rise of social media-savvy groups like Islamic State, who use Twitter to great effect for recruitment and propaganda purposes.
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“The current ISIS network on Twitter is less than 10 percent of what it was in 2014 when we did the census”, he said. An analysis of English-language pro-ISIS Twitter accounts in 2015 showed that the frequent suspensions have limited the reach of repeat offenders, according to a report from the George Washington University’s Program on Extremism released in February. The judge left open the option of refiling an amended version of the suit.
