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Twitter shuts 235000 more ‘extremist’ accounts

But new accounts could pop up more quickly than Twitter could take them down, thanks to the ease with which users can create new accounts on Twitter with just an email address.

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Twitter on Thursday said it has suspended 235,000 user accounts since February for violating its rules against promoting violence and terrorism, and it has purged around 360,000 accounts since mid-2015.

Twitter said daily suspensions of accounts mostly related to ISIS are up over 80 percent since a year ago, with suspensions spiking following terror attacks.

They say they will continue to work with law enforcement bodies seeking assistance with investigations to prevent or prosecute terror attacks.

There is no single “magic algorithm” for “identifying terrorist content on the Internet”, noted the Twitter statement.

Daily suspensions of Twitter accounts are up over 80% since previous year, with “spikes in suspensions immediately following terrorist attacks”, according to the company.

Salaam Bhatti, the national spokesperson for True Islam, a group which has partnered with Twitter in identifying extremist content, said: “This is a great step in the right direction”.

In July, the company reported that ISIS traffic on Twitter has plummeted by 45% in two years. Twitter will be publishing its efforts in regular updates in its transparency report. Like other social media companies, it uses a variety of tools, including spam-fighting technology, automatic identification as well as reports from users, to help combat abuse.

Twitter’s crackdown on violent extremism has resulted in an additional 235,000 accounts being suspended over the past six months, according to a post today on the company’s blog.

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In fact, over the past six months the tools have helped twitter to automatically identify more than one third of the accounts which are suspended for promoting terrorism.

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