TOUGHER TWITTER
KOs 377K more accounts over ‘terrorism’ fears
Jack Dorsey’s Twitter is getting tough on terrorists spreading hate on its social network.
The microblogger said Tuesday it had suspended 376,890 accounts for promoting terrorism during the second half of 2016, an increase of 60 percent since August 2015.
The shuttered terrorist-linked accounts represent one of every 850 active users as Twitter reported 319 million active users as of Dec. 31.
The moves by Twitter — bringing the total terror-related account suspensions since August 2015 to 636,248 — come as governments look to crack down on the use of social media by terror groups to recruit followers.
“It will be interesting to see what kind of investment Twitter will make in the future so that they’re not playing whack-a-mole” in trying to shut down accounts, Michael Sulmeyer, director of the Cyber Security Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, told The Post.
Twitter also will want to “get ahead of attacking this threat without risking attacks on free speech,” Sulmeyer said.
Of the accounts suspended in the last six months of 2016, almost 75 percent were identified with Twitter’s proprietary spam-fighting tools, roughly twice the proportion of accounts that were identified by the technology in August, the company said in its 10th semiannual report.
Less than 2 percent of the suspensions came from requests from governments around the world.
As Twitter, run by Chief Executive Dorsey, continues to increase its efforts to shut down terror-related accounts, the company conceded last August that there is no “magic algorithm” for identifying such accounts. At that time, Twitter reported that it suspended 235,000 accounts for in the period between Feb. 5 and Aug. 18.
The company’s spam-fighting tools identified only roughly one-third of closed accounts during that earlier period.
“It’s a good thing Twitter put out the report,” Faiza Patel, co-director for the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, an institute at NYU’s law school, told The Post — while voicing some skepticism.
“But how many of the 600,000 accounts taken down are the same users?” Patel asked, adding that it would be helpful if Twitter could confirm that the suspended users don’t find new ways of logging into the platform.
Data on the efficacy on shutting down terror-related social media accounts are inconclusive, Patel said.
On the one hand, closing accounts limits a group’s reach, but new accounts could crop up and data-collecting ability on such groups could be lost, she said.
“At the end of the day, I want to know the types of accounts taken down,” Patel said, adding that a breakdown of the terror groups that have had their accounts suspended is also important.
In February 2016, when Twitter first reported that it suspended the accounts for promoting terrorism, it said that the more than 125,000 accounts shuttered between the middle of 2015 and February 2016 were “primarily related to ISIS.”