Twitter removes 1.6 lakh terror-promoting accounts

Twitter suspended 166,513 accounts for promoting terrorismin the July-December 2018 period, saying there’s a steady decrease in terroristgroups trying to use the platform owing to its “zero-tolerance policyenforcement”.

According to Vijaya Gadde, Legal, Policy and Trust andSafety Lead at Twitter, there is a reduction of 19 per cent terror-relatedtweets from the previous reporting period (January-June 2018).

   

“Of those suspensions, 91 per cent consisted ofaccounts flagged by internal, purpose-built technological tools,” she saidin a blog post late Thursday.

Twitter said that in the majority of cases, it took actionat the account setup stage — before the account even Tweets.

“We have received government information requests from86 countries. The US now comprises only 30 per cent of global governmentinformation requests and 35 per cent of all global accounts specified in thesame category,” informed Gadde.

The second highest volume of information requests weresubmitted by Japan (24 per cent of global information requests).

Requests from the UK (13 per cent), India (6 per cent),Germany (6 per cent) and France (5 per cent) together account for 30 percent ofall global information requests, and 29 per cent of all global accountsspecified.

“We received roughly 8 per cent fewer global legalrequests to remove content, impacting approximately 2 per cent fewer accounts,compared to the previous reporting period,” said Gadde.

Twitter received legal requests specifying 27,283 accountsfrom 48 countries, including Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia and Slovenia forthe first time.

“Nearly 74 per cent of the total global volume of legalrequests to remove content originated from only two countries: Russia andTurkey,” said the company.

During the reporting period, Twitter suspended a total of456,989 unique accounts for violations related to child sexual exploitation,which is down 6 per cent from the previous reporting period.

Of those unique accounts suspended, 96 per cent weresurfaced by a combination of technology solutions, including PhotoDNA andinternal proprietary tools.

“Proactive challenges of accounts for spammy behaviourand platform manipulation have decreased by 17 per cent in the second half of2018 versus the first half — totalling 194 million challenges in the secondhalf of 2018,” said Gadde.

Approximately 75 per cent were subsequently automaticallyremoved after failing Twitter’s account challenge process.

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