Twitter Says It Suspended 1.2 Million Accounts for Terrorism-Promotion Violations

Twitter Inc. said Thursday it suspended 1.21 million accounts from its social media platform between August 2015 and the end of 2017 for “violations related to the promotion of terrorism.”

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They included 274,460 suspended accounts in the second half of 2017, which were down 8.4% from the previous reporting period and the second consecutive period “in which we’ve seen a drop in the number of accounts being suspended for this reason,” Twitter said in a blog post covering its 12th biannual “transparency report.”

Twitter also said 74% of the accounts involved in the latest reporting period “were suspended before their first tweet.”

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Twitter said that 93% of the 274,460 accounts suspended in the last half of 2017 “were flagged by [the company’s] internal, proprietary tools” and that government reports of such violations accounted for only 0.2% of all suspensions.

Twitter began mass suspensions of such accounts in early 2014 as the San Francisco-based company responded to criticism that it wasn’t doing enough to crack down on users who promote or are linked to terrorist groups.

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Last year, relatives of the victims of the attack filed a federal lawsuit against Twitter, Google and Facebook, accusing the tech giants of knowingly supporting Islamic State and its extremist agenda.

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