Twitter suspended more than 1.2 million accounts that were promoting terrorism over a two year stretch, the company announced Thursday, including more than 274,000 accounts in the last six months of 2017.
Twitter has suspended more than 1.2 million terrorism-related accounts since late 2015
It suspended more than 274,000 accounts just in the last six months of 2017.
It’s not really the kind of “one million user” milestone anyone likes to celebrate. On one hand, it’s good to know that Twitter is finding and removing these accounts in such vast quantities. On the other hand, it’s scary to think that there are so many terrorism-related Twitter accounts to begin with — and concerning that they keep targeting Twitter as a place to spread their messages.
The silver lining here is that the number of accounts Twitter removed in the back half of 2017 was down more than 27 percent from the last six months of 2016. Twitter says that’s because it’s getting better at dissuading people from creating them to begin with.
“We continue to see the positive, significant impact of years of hard work making our site an undesirable place for those seeking to promote terrorism, resulting in this type of activity increasingly shifting away from Twitter,” the company wrote in a blog post.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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