Twitter removes 125,000 terrorism accounts
Australia’s B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) has commended Twitter for suspending 125,000 accounts for “threatening or promoting terrorist acts” since the middle of 2015.
Dvir Abramovich
The company also reported that it has increased the number of teams that review reports of accounts flagged as associated with extremism so as to enable their speedy removal. In a statement, the company said, “As the nature of the terrorist threat has changed, so has our ongoing work in this area,” adding that, “Like most people around the world, we are horrified by the atrocities perpetrated by extremist groups. We condemn the use of Twitter to promote terrorism.”
Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the ADC, issued the following statement: “As the first Australian organisation to join the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Working Group on Cyber Hate which includes YouTube, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Twitter, we welcome this very positive development and commend Twitter for stepping up its efforts to thwart terrorists from manipulating its platform to promote their vile ideologies and to recruit members.
As we have stated previously, social media giants and technology companies in the private sector have a responsibility to aggressively clamp down on terrorist-related activities and to shut down those accounts. We know that Isis and other terrorist groups maintain a strong presence on this social network, dispatching hundreds of thousands of tweets a day. We trust that Twitter will continue to devote more resources to confronting the deeply troubling growth of digital terrorism, and will keep developing new technologies and strategies to counteract this increasing threat.”
