This article was published on February 5, 2016

Twitter has removed 125,000 terrorism accounts to fight ISIS


Twitter has removed 125,000 terrorism accounts to fight ISIS

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.

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.

Keep fighting the good fight, Twitter.

Twitter shuts down 125K terrorist accounts [CNBC]

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