Twitter suspends over 376,000 accounts for promoting terrorism

Twitter is getting aggressive in its battle against terrorist accounts. After suspending 235,000 accounts in the first half of 2016, Twitter suspended over 376,000 accounts for backing terrorism in the second half of the year.

In its semiannual “transparency report,” Twitter said it suspended some 376,000 accounts during the last six months of 2016 for “violations related to promotion of terrorism,” a rate of about 63,000 a month. That is up from about 24,000 a month or 80 percent up from last year.

The report covers stats on government and non-government information requests, legitimate requests to remove content, trademark and copyright notices, and a new section called government ‘terms of service’ requests, which relates to non-legal requests around terrorist content.

Since August 1, 2015, to December 2016 the company has suspended a total of 636,248 accounts. The number of suspensions is three times more than what social media site deleted in the second half of 2015.

Twitter said that out of the total accounts suspended for advocating political or religious violence, 74 percent were identified by “internal, proprietary spam-fighting tools,” rather than by users or authorities. Less than 2 percent were suspended after officials complained that a user was violating Twitter’s terms of service and the rest from user reports.

Twitter also revealed the number of requests received from nations to remove content posted by verified journalists and media outlets. In the last six months of 2016, Twitter received 88 court orders and other legal requests from around the world with 77 of them from Turkey.

The micro-blogging site also said it filed legal objections whenever possible, but that in Turkey, “disappointingly, none of our objections prevailed.”

Twitter also updated its transparency report with the number of new government information requests it received in 2016. The United States government added a total of 2,304 account information requests with Twitter complying with approximately 82 percent of those requests and provided “some information.”

Twitter has also promised to upload additional updates on its efforts to combat online extremism in future reports.