Programs help Twitter block terror posts

Twitter Inc., under pressure from governments around the world to combat online extremism, says improving automation tools are helping to block accounts that promote terrorism and violence.

In the first half of the year, Twitter said it suspended nearly 300,000 accounts globally linked to terrorism. Of those, 95 percent were identified by the company’s spam-fighting automation tools.

Meanwhile, the social network said government data requests continued to increase, and that it provided authorities with data on roughly 3,900 accounts from January to June.

The increasing role of machines in fighting extremism is a function of necessity, since manually identifying violent material within the millions of messages sent every day is an impossible task. Twitter currently has about 328 million users.

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are building automation tools that quickly spot troublesome content. Facebook has roughly 7,500 people who screen for troublesome videos and posts.

Twitter said about 75 percent of the blocked accounts this year were spotted before a single tweet was sent, and that 935,897 accounts had been suspended since August 2015 — two-thirds of those coming in the past year.

“Our anti-spam tools are getting faster, more efficient and smarter in how we take down accounts that violate our policy,” Twitter said in a statement.

U.S. authorities made 2,111 requests from Twitter from January to June, the most of the 83 countries tracked by the company. Twitter supplied information on users in 77 percent of the inquiries. Japan made 1,384 requests and the U.K. issued 606 requests.