Over the last year, Twitter has been suspending accounts for promoting terrorism. The social network had already made it public that 125,000 accounts were suspended between mid-2015 and early 2016. Today we learned that Twitter has added an additional 235,000 suspensions, bringing their two-year total to 360,000 accounts.
By Twitter’s own admission, quickly identifying accounts promoting terrorism can be a challenge, but the company reports that daily suspensions are up over 80 percent in the last year. The company also noted that suspensions tend to spike in the days immediately following major terror attacks.
Identifying behavioral patterns and implementing proprietary spam fighting tools have enabled the company to sharpen its response time, and ultimately Daesh traffic on Twitter has plummeted by 45 percent in the last two years. While algorithmic techniques account for approximately one-third of account detections, the other two-thirds is a product of around the clock efforts from dedicated Twitter teams.
We are reaching out to Twitter and will update this post if we receive additional information.