Is Twitter doing enough to fight online terrorism?
Twitter has recently closed down another 235,000 accounts for activities linked to terrorism, taking the total number of accounts suspended to 360,000 in the last year.
"Daily suspensions are up over 80 percent since last year, with spikes in suspensions immediately following terrorist attacks," the company said in a blog post.
"Our response time for suspending reported accounts, the amount of time these accounts are on Twitter, and the number of followers they accumulate have all decreased dramatically," it added.
Twitter said it's working hard to make sure those whose accounts have been suspended cannot simply make another account and carry on with their suspicious activities.
It has taken on more staff to help it carry out more checks, plus improved technology and language capabilities to help the network stamp out terrorist activity on its platform.
"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," the company said. "But we continue to utilize other forms of technology, like proprietary spam-fighting tools, to supplement reports from our users and help identify repeat account abuse."
Twitter said it's working alongside other social networks and other groups that are trying to counter violent extremism to help identify the people carrying out such activity and it will continue to invest heavily in ways to combat terrorism.
"Finally, we continue to work with law enforcement entities seeking assistance with investigations to prevent or prosecute terror attacks," the company finished. "Twitter responds to valid legal process issued in compliance with applicable law as explained in our Law Enforcement Guidelines, and we report on these government requests (in aggregate) twice a year, in our Transparency Report."
