Twitter target: Online terrorists
Company cracked down on 235,000 accounts for violent, extremist content
SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter suspended 235,000 accounts for promoting terrorism in the last six months and has been stepping up its efforts to pull violent, extremist content off its website, the social media company said Thursday.
“We strongly condemn these acts and remain committed to eliminating the promotion of violence or terrorism on our platform,” the company said in a blog post.
Since mid-2015, Twitter has shut down 360,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorism. The number of accounts Twitter has taken down daily has increased by more than 80 percent compared to last year and there have been spikes in suspensions following terrorist attacks, the tech firm said.
Social media companies
have been under increasing pressure from lawmakers, advocacy groups and victims’ families to do more to combat terrorist activity online. Militants of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have used the websites to recruit, broadcast execution videos, raise funds and more.
But some experts say that Twitter has lagged behind other tech firms such as Facebook and Google-owned YouTube when it comes to tackling the problem.
“Different companies are more sincere when it comes to dealing with this. It took Twitter many years to even address it,” said Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.
The company didn’t make a public statement about suspending accounts until images of the beheading of American journalist James Foley started circulating on the site in 2014, Stalinsky said.
While communicating on Twitter is limited to 140 characters, Stalinsky noted that terrorist groups often use the site to link to videos and other content. Tech firms should be working together to come up with an industry standard, he said.
Twitter, which has 313 million monthly active users, relies on users to flag content that promote terrorism, but also uses spam-fighting tools to combat repeated violations. The time it takes to respond to these complaints has also decreased and the company has been working with other social platforms.
YouTube and Facebook have started using tech- nology that was initially created to flag and remove copyrighted content to automatically take down videos posted by the Islamic State, according to a report by Reuters in June, which cited two people familiar with the process.
“As we mentioned in February, and other companies and experts have also noted, there is no one ‘magic algorithm’ for identifying terrorist content on the Internet,” Twitter said in the blog post.
J.M. Berger, a fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism, estimates that the total size of ISIS’s presence on Twitter is down more than 90 percent from 2014. But Berger also pointed out that Twitter released data about the number of accounts suspended, not the number of users.
“Many ISIS supporters are suspended repeatedly as they create new accounts over and over again. I can’t estimate the total number of these repeat offenders, but it’s a non-trivial amount,” he said in an email.
Still, the strategy of suspending accounts can be effective and reduce the number of followers, some experts say.
“ISIS users constantly try to get back on Twitter and Facebook, because they can’t recruit from other platforms where they maintain a presence, like Telegram and WhatsApp,” Berger said. “To win new supporters, they have to be out in the open, where their potential recruits are. So these efforts to keep them offline are very important, and ISIS social media activists have acknowledged that suspensions are hurting their efforts.”