Twitter suspends 166,153 accounts for posting terrorism related content

Twitter in its quest to tackle online terrorism content on its platform says it suspended over 166,000 accounts in the second half of last year.

Together with Facebook and Google, Twitter is under pressure from regulators and governments worldwide to remove extremist content more rapidly or face more heavy-handed legislation.

Announcing its latest transparency report, the company said its technical tools were producing results, with 91 percent of accounts promoting terrorism content proactively suspended by its internal technology, the majority of which happened before their first tweet because the data used to set them up raised red flags.

Twitter suspended 166,153 accounts between July and December last for promoting terrorism, a 19 percent drop from the 205,156 accounts suspended in the previous six months.

According to Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s vice president for public policy, “this sharp decrease is indicative of a larger trend we are now observing year-on-year the numbers of terrorist organizations attempting to use our service is reducing. This can be attributed to a robust technical approach that we’ve enhanced over many years. We are encouraged by these metrics but will remain vigilant”.