Twitter announced on Friday it has been working aggressively to combat terrorists using its service since the middle of last year, though that fact was not shared with the public until now.
“Since the middle of 2015 alone, we’ve suspended over 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS,” Twitter said in a statement. It added that the size of teams that review flagged accounts has also grown, and that content related to terrorism was beginning to shift off the site as a result.
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The statement follows months of debate in Washington over whether policy measures should be taken that would affect how social media sites deal with terrorism. Legislation introduced in the Senate in December would require social media sites to report suspect activity, though the terms of that requirement would be vague, to the chagrin of sites like Twitter.
In December, a California woman even filed a federal lawsuit against Twitter, alleging that the site has acted as a “tool for spreading extremist propaganda” for the Islamic State, and that it had resulted in her husband’s shooting death in Jordan.
Until now, the public assumed that Twitter had done little to prevent terrorist activity on their systems. Yet in addition to revealing the fact that the site has been dealing with extremist activity, it also indicates the scale of that activity is greater than thought. A study released by the Brookings Institution estimated only 46,000 Twitter accounts were in active use by Islamic State members between September and December 2014.
“As many experts and other companies have noted, there is no ‘magic algorithm’ for identifying terrorist content on the Internet, so global online platforms are forced to make challenging judgement calls based on very limited information and guidance,” Twitter said in the Friday statement.
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“In spite of these challenges, we will continue to aggressively enforce our Rules in this area, and engage with authorities and other relevant organizations to find solutions to this critical issue and promote powerful counter-speech narratives,” it added.
