As extremist groups are becoming more vigilant about taking their recruiting efforts and propaganda campaigns online, companies like Twitter are often left to police its platform for suspected terrorist activity, a monumental task considering the size of its userbase.
For the first time publicly, Twitter today revealed the scale at which terrorists — or suspected terrorists — were using its platform. A tweet from the company’s official, @Policy account said that it has currently shut down 125,000 accounts since mid-2015, and has plans to continue to step up the fight against online extremism.
A majority of these accounts, reportedly, were ISIS-related.
Since mid-2015, we have suspended over 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts. Read more here: https://t.co/FQJeOTtPLz
— Policy (@policy) February 5, 2016
The company also said it has increased the size of the moderation team responsible for viewing reports on suspected terrorist accounts, and ultimately shutting them down both through human input and a proprietary spam filter.
“We have already seen results, including an increase in account suspensions and this type of activity shifting off of Twitter,” a company representative said.
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Keep fighting the good fight, Twitter.
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