Twitter closes 235,000 accounts touting terrorism

Twitter Inc. said Thursday that it has shut down more than 235,000 accounts for promoting terrorism since February, far surpassing the 125,000 it had suspended in the previous seven months.

That brings the total number of such suspensions to 360,000 since June 2015.

For the last two years, the San Francisco company has sought to respond to criticism that it wasn’t doing enough to crack down on users who promote or are linked to Islamic State or other terrorist groups. It began mass suspensions in early 2014.

In December, after the San Bernardino mass shootings, President Obama called on tech leaders to “make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice.” This year, senior national security officials met with tech firm senior executives to discuss ways to use technology to “disrupt paths to radicalization to violence.”

Twitter said daily suspensions are up more than 80% since last year.

Separately on Thursday, Twitter announced the rollout of a “quality filter” to all users. It’s essentially an automated moderation tool to hide tweets that are abusive, threatening or spam.

The tool “filters lower-quality content, such as duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience,” product manager Emil Leong said. “It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with — and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings.”