The latest transparency report from Twitter claims that over 270,000 accounts all across the globe had been removed in the second half of 2017 by the company as part of its policy for banning users promoting terrorism.
For the second consecutive period, there was a drop in the number of accounts that were suspended permanently on grounds of sharing content that the company called extremist content in the second part of the year between July and December.
According to the social networking company, this is because of “years of hard work making our site an undesirable place for those seeking to promote terrorism”.
“The overwhelming majority of these accounts were detected by our own technology, with just 0.2% of the accounts we suspended in 2017 being flagged by the police,” said Nick Pickles, Twitter UK’s head of public policy.
The transparency report showed that tools built by Twitter engineers were used to identify 93 per cent of the accounts while for nearly 75 per cent of the accounts suspended, it had been done before the first tweet could be sent.
The process of identification of terrorists on its network by Twitter included research work done by academics and experts in addition to a combination of terrorists organizations listed by the EU and the U.S., according to reports.
While there has been a marked change in the type of abusive behaviour that was reported, there also had been a drop in the number of reports of abusive behaviour that is submitted by representatives from the government, the report noted. While the reports had 16 per cent for harassment and 12 per cent for hate content, violation of rules of impersonation accounted for almost two-thirds of the 10,000 reports.
Compared to 98 per cent of reports relating to the “promotion of terrorism” that were acted upon by the company only about one fourth of reports related to abusive behaviour were acted upon by Twitter.
While the biannual transparency report from the company provides details of the reports made by government agencies from all across the world, it does not give nay details of the private requests from individual users made to the social media platform.
During the period of the report, five court orders and 760 requests for information was made by the UK government while 1,761 requests for information on accounts was made by the US government. And with 466 court orders and 3,828 requests of a different legal nature, the most legal demands were made by Turkey.
Accounts of a number of well-known right-wing activities from the U.S. and the U.K have bene removed by Twitter in the last six months. The list includes names such as Britain First and Tommy Robinson from the UK. Supporters of the activists however cried foul over censorship.
(Source:www.theguardian.com)
For the second consecutive period, there was a drop in the number of accounts that were suspended permanently on grounds of sharing content that the company called extremist content in the second part of the year between July and December.
According to the social networking company, this is because of “years of hard work making our site an undesirable place for those seeking to promote terrorism”.
“The overwhelming majority of these accounts were detected by our own technology, with just 0.2% of the accounts we suspended in 2017 being flagged by the police,” said Nick Pickles, Twitter UK’s head of public policy.
The transparency report showed that tools built by Twitter engineers were used to identify 93 per cent of the accounts while for nearly 75 per cent of the accounts suspended, it had been done before the first tweet could be sent.
The process of identification of terrorists on its network by Twitter included research work done by academics and experts in addition to a combination of terrorists organizations listed by the EU and the U.S., according to reports.
While there has been a marked change in the type of abusive behaviour that was reported, there also had been a drop in the number of reports of abusive behaviour that is submitted by representatives from the government, the report noted. While the reports had 16 per cent for harassment and 12 per cent for hate content, violation of rules of impersonation accounted for almost two-thirds of the 10,000 reports.
Compared to 98 per cent of reports relating to the “promotion of terrorism” that were acted upon by the company only about one fourth of reports related to abusive behaviour were acted upon by Twitter.
While the biannual transparency report from the company provides details of the reports made by government agencies from all across the world, it does not give nay details of the private requests from individual users made to the social media platform.
During the period of the report, five court orders and 760 requests for information was made by the UK government while 1,761 requests for information on accounts was made by the US government. And with 466 court orders and 3,828 requests of a different legal nature, the most legal demands were made by Turkey.
Accounts of a number of well-known right-wing activities from the U.S. and the U.K have bene removed by Twitter in the last six months. The list includes names such as Britain First and Tommy Robinson from the UK. Supporters of the activists however cried foul over censorship.
(Source:www.theguardian.com)
