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Twitter suspends 235,000 accounts for extremism

Elizabeth Weise
USATODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter said it has suspended 235,000 accounts for violating policies on the promotion of extremism and terrorism over the past six months, bringing the overall number of suspended accounts to 360,000 in the last year.

Twitter's San Francisco headquarters

The company has also expanded the teams that review reports of misuse of the networking service, which had become a go-to tool for some terror and extremist groups looking to get their message out.

Twitter said daily suspensions are up more than 80% since last year and that such suspensions jump just after terrorist attacks, when presumably extremists wish to tout their success.

After the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, the Obama administration and presidential candidates had criticized social media platforms for not doing more to police extremist groups. In February, Twitter said it had suspended 125,000 accounts connected to the Islamic State in the past six months.

In a blog post Thursday Twitter said it is working to disrupt extremists' ability to quickly create replacement accounts by expanding the teams that review reports of behavior that violates its terms and agreements. These teams work 24 hours a day, the company said.

Separately, it rolled out new tools aimed at reducing harassment, an endemic problem that's contributed to stagnant user growth. A quality filter will allow any user to get hide tweets that appear automated. And it will let users choose to limit their notifications to only those from people they follow.

To fight terrorist groups, the company said it's been using some of its own spam-fighting tools, allowing it to reduce the amount of time these users they exist on Twitter and the number of followers they gain.

Twitter rolls out new tools to hide harassment, threats

A study by researchers at George Washington University in Washington D.C. earlier this year found significant reductions in the number of Twitter followers for individuals who had to continually create new Twitter accounts after being suspended.

Security analyst J. M. Berger, co-author on the paper, said he estimates the total size of ISIS's presence on Twitter is down more than 90% from 2014.

In part because of pressure from Twitter, much of the messaging and propaganda from Islamic extremists has moved from Twitter to other platforms, such as the encrypted messaging service Telegram, said Veryan Khan, editorial director with the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, a private firm that collects information on terrorism.

“Certainly Islamic State still uses Twitter to amplify its messaging, but it’s not their primary release point at all. Even passers-by who might be supportive of IS on Twitter are quickly re-navigated to Telegram,” she said.

Still, ISIS users are in a constant battle with Twitter and Facebook to open new accounts to replaced closed ones, because those platforms are key to reaching the broader world, said Berger.

“To win new supporters, they have to be out in the open, where their potential recruits are. So these efforts to keep them offline are very important, and ISIS social media activists have acknowledged that suspensions are hurting their efforts,” he said.

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