Twitter Suspends 1.2 Million Accounts For Links To Terrorism!
The company has promised to take better steps to make Twitter a safer place and has sought the public's input to fix the problems.
In a bid to make Twitter a safer platform and improve quality of the content, the social media company has suspended more than 1.2 million accounts for promoting terrorism-related content between 2015 and 2017. Twitter has recently initiated a massive crackdown on ‘tweetdecking’.
Tweetdecking had been a source of income for many users, who sell retweets are for money to force them to go viral and boost the number of followers. To minimize abuse, the company has deleted almost all accounts posting any sort of terrorist-linked content.
Last year, the company had deleted over 275,000 accounts for promoting terrorism.
Cleaning Up The Toxic Environment
According to the latest transparency report, a large number of accounts have been reported by governments all over the world. The social media giant has been heavily criticized in the past for promoting abusive behaviour as hate speech, racism, misogyny and trolling.
The company has promised to take better steps to make Twitter a safer place and has sought the public’s input to fix the platform’s environment.
Twitter posts two transparency reports every year. After the Facebook scandal, all social media platforms are being deeply scrutinized. Twitter has been under the scanner for years accused of failing to stop the spread of hate, misinformation and propaganda on the platform.
Content Moderation & Online Hatred
Different governments have earlier claimed that the company has effectively failed to remove violent, threatening and racist tweets in spite of committees reporting months earlier in several cases. Online hatred and abuse on social media platforms generally are on a rise amidst political agendas in the recent years, especially in Europe.
The content moderation policies have been blamed as the primary reason by governments and lawmakers.
Recently, the EC has issued new rules for the social media platforms, where it orders the operators to take down any illegal content within an hour of it being reported. The rule has not received a legislation yet, but it will help to improve performance and transparency.
Proactive Measures & Automation
Content moderation is very important when it comes to blocking content, specifically where terrorism is being promoted. Twitter has been pushing and making necessary changes to add more proactive measures with automated detection of such content.
Governments are taking measures to stop terrorism promotion and are taking help of tools to block abusive content on the internet, which will eventually force the companies to take necessary action on content moderation.
The company has faced immense pressure from different governments around the world to pull down content related to terrorism. Such content has rocketed in the recent years, and governments want Twitter to suspend all accounts related to Jihad or anyone calling for violent attacks. Twitter has taken up measures lately to crack down terror-related accounts and at the same time maintain an open platform for free speech.
Accounts have been deleted on the basis of the content of tweets which violated the terms and rules in – impersonation (66 percent), harassment (16 percent) and hateful conduct (12 percent).
As per the reports, around 1.2 million accounts has been suspended in the latest transparency fix and more will follow in the coming months. The company has also asked users to help it with reporting such abusive content and assist Twitter to grow as a clean platform and maintain freedom of speech.
