TWITTER ACTS IN FIGHT AGAINST TERROR
San Francisco firm announces it deleted 125,000 terroristrelated accounts.
WASHINGTON — Twitter Inc. announced Friday that it had deleted 125,000 terrorist- related accounts in the last seven months.
The moves comes after months of criticism from President Obama and others who complained that social media companies weren’t doing enough to stif le extremist discussion online.
Still, Twitter was light on details about the deleted accounts and how the process works. The San Francisco company said only that more workers were reviewing accounts, leading to increased and faster deletions.
The 125,000 f igure also doesn’t mean that many suspected terrorists may have tried to use Twitter, because an individual or group could have created new accounts after being banned previously. Twitter suggested it’s dominating the whack- a- mole game, saying — without citing specific evidence — that terrorist talk is “shifting off of Twitter.”
The Obama administration sees otherwise.
Twitter is “still not doing enough,” a U. S. official familiar with discussions with company executives said in an interview. “They don’t put a lot of resources into this.... What does it matter if they take down an account and instead of ‘@ ISILTerrorist001,’ it is ‘@ ISILTerrorist002’ two minutes later?”
Federal authorities say terrorists have used Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other apps to recruit and organize members. Authorities want to stop the spread of extremist propaganda while gaining access to private messages that might tip them off to impending terrorist attacks.
But tech companies, many of them based in California, fear violating free speech rights and prying into users’ conversations. Twitter has about 320 million users.
In multiple meetings over the last year, Department of Justice and Homeland Security officials have asked Twitter to be more aggressive.
But it wasn’t only U. S. government pressure that motivated Twitter to announce how many accounts have been taken down in the last several months, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
“They realize it is not a good thing to be known as the social media platform that ISIL uses most to spread their hate and horrible things,” the official said, using an alternative acronym for the terrorist organization Islamic State. Off icials were particularly incensed last year when Islamic State used Twitter to post the names and addresses of U. S. military personnel.
Twitter called its removal decisions “challenging judgment calls based on very limited information and guidance” because “there is no ‘ magic algorithm’ for identifying terrorist content on the Internet.”
Rep. Adam Schiff ( DBurbank), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called Twitter’s efforts to remove terrorist content “a very positive development” and encouraged more cooperation.