Twitter announced on Tuesday that it has suspended nearly 300,000 accounts in the first six months of this year for promoting or being linked to terrorism.
The social media company said its ongoing work to eliminate these accounts led to an 80 percent drop in the number of accounts that governments reported to Twitter in the first six months of the year, compared to the last six months of 2016.
The company also said that by using proprietary software, most of those newly suspended accounts were blocked before posting their first Tweet.
The efforts to stop accounts linked to terrorism have been important after numerous reports flourished in 2014 claiming that al Qaeda and the Islamic State were using Twitter to recruit members and to promote their propaganda.
“We have suspended a total of 935,897 accounts for the promotion of terrorism in the period of August 1, 2015 through June 30, 2017,” a statement said on Twitter’s website.
