Twitter: 1.6 lakh terror-promoting accounts removed from the platform

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Twitter has suspended almost 166,513 accounts that were promoting terrorism from July-December 2018, saying that there is a steady decrease in terrorist groups trying to use the same platform that owes to 'zero-tolerance policy enforcement'.

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According to Twitter Legal, Policy and Trust and Safety Lead, Vijaya Gadde there is a reduction of 19 per cent terror-related tweets from previous reporting period comprising of January to June 2018.

A blog post on Thursday said, "Of those suspensions, 91 per cent consisted of accounts flagged by internal, purpose-built technological tools".

According to Twitter, in major cases, the company had taken action at the account setup stage even before the account tweeted. Gadde informed, "We have received government information requests from 86 countries. The US now comprises only 30 per cent of global government information requests and 35 per cent of all global accounts specified in the same category".

Japan saw the second highest volume of information requests i.e. 24 per cent of global information request, followed with 13 per cent from the UK, 6 per cent from India, 6 per cent from Germany and 5 per cent from France that together accounts for 30 per cent for all global information requests and 29 per cent of all global accounts specified.

Gadde said, "We received roughly 8 per cent fewer global legal requests to remove content, impacting approximately 2 per cent fewer accounts, compared to the previous reporting period".

Twitter received a legal request that specifies 27,283 accounts from 48 countries that include Kyrgyzstan, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Macedonia.

The company said, "Nearly 74 per cent of the total global volume of legal requests to remove content originated from only two countries: Russia and Turkey".

Twitter suspended a total of 456,989 unique accounts for violations related to child sexual exploitation, during the reporting period that is down 6 per cent from the previous reporting period.

Among the unique accounts suspended, 96 per cent were surfaced by technology solution combination that includes PhotoDNA and internal proprietary tools.

Gadde said, "Proactive challenges of accounts for spammy behaviour and platform manipulation have decreased by 17 per cent in the second half of 2018 versus the first half -- totalling 194 million challenges in the second half of 2018".

There are approximately 75 per cent that were subsequently removed after failing Twitter's account challenge process.

(With IANS inputs)

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