Twitter bans hundreds of thousands of terrorist accounts in unprecedented crackdown on extremist tweets

Twitter has banned hundreds of thousands of accounts in its attempts to get terrorists off its platform.

The company has announced that it has suspended 235,000 accounts for violating the site’s policies related to terrorism since February 2016. That brings the full number of suspensions up to 360,000 – though it has been open in saying that its “work is not done”.

Twitter has been repeatedly criticised for serving as an especially helpful breeding ground for terrorists, who take advantage of the site’s relatively open form to post propaganda and messages. This week it came in for criticism as part of the Anjem Choudary trial, where along with other platforms it was blamed for helping amplify the now convicted preacher’s voice.

But at the same time it has been working to remove those voices from its site. Many have said that such activity is becoming more rare and difficult as the site cracks down on Isis supporters and other extremists.

Suspensions have increased 80 per cent over the last year, the site said, and those numbers spike in the wake of terrorist attacks. That has partly been done by expanding the teams that review reported accounts, and also by “collaborating with other social platforms”, so that they can share information about accounts that need to be banned.

“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,” Twitter’s policy team said. “We have also made progress in disrupting the ability of those suspended to immediately return to the platform.”

The company said that it was still difficult to find out the terrorist content from the rest of the information posted on Twitter.

“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,” Twitter’s policy team wrote. “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.

“In fact, over the past six months these tools have helped us to automatically identify more than one third of the accounts we ultimately suspended for promoting terrorism.”

As well as using technological approaches, Twitter’s policy and other teams also work with organisations that work to counter extremism online. That has included work with groups including the UK-based Imams Online, and other similar organisations across the world.

And that same work includes similar partnerships with law enforcement organisations. Twitter has rules in place that allow governments and other bodies to ask for certain content to be taken down, and it reports on how much it has done so in yearly reports.