Compliance Management, Threat Management, Privacy

Twitter has shut down 125K accounts amid terrorism concerns since mid-2015

In an effort to help curb terrorism, Twitter has suspended 125,000 accounts since mid-2015 that it said threatened or promoted terrorist acts.

“We condemn the use of Twitter to promote terrorism and the Twitter Rules make it clear that this type of behavior, or any violent threat, is not permitted on our service,” the social media giant said in a Friday blog post.

The company has boosted the number of people it has assigned to reviewing reports of suspicious accounts and has cooperated with law enforcement, it said, when appropriate.

“We also look into other accounts similar to those reported and leverage proprietary spam-fighting tools to surface other potentially violating accounts for review by our agents,” the blog post said. “We have already seen results, including an increase in account suspensions and this type of activity shifting off of Twitter.”

Pledging to continue to take aggressive action in the future, the company acknowledged that a “magic algorithm” simply doesn't exist to identify terrorist content and that it, like other online companies, “are forced to make challenging judgement calls based on very limited information and guidance.”

The blog post gave a rundown of Twitter's efforts to help thwart ISIS and other terrorist organizations.

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