Twitter takes down accounts in terror probe

Twitter removed more than 270,000 accounts around the world for promoting terrorism on the social network in the second half of 2017, according to the company’s latest transparency report.

The number of accounts permanently suspended for sharing extremist content between July and December represents a drop for the second period in a row.

The social network puts this result down to “years of hard work making our site an undesirable place for those seeking to promote terrorism”.

Nick Pickles, Twitter UK’S head of public policy, said: “The overwhelming majority of these accounts were detected by our own technology, with just 0.2 per cent of the accounts we suspended in 2017 being flagged by the police.”