Twitter suspends more than 6 lakh accounts

International Desk: It may be a drop in the bucket, but every drop is significant: Twitter revealed in its Twitter Transparency Report for the second half of 2016 that it suspended 636,248 accounts from Aug. 1, 2015, through Dec. 31, 2016, for “violations related to promotion of terrorism.”

The social network said in the section on government terms of service reports:

During the reporting period of July 1, 2016, through Dec. 31, 2016, a total of 376,890 accounts were suspended for violations related to promotion of terrorism. Of those suspensions, 74 percent consisted of accounts surfaced by internal, proprietary spam-fighting tools. The government TOS requests included in the table above represent less than 2 percent of all suspensions in the reported time period.

To expand on our past blog posts (from Feb. 5 and Aug. 18, 2016), we have suspended a total of 636,248 accounts in the period of Aug. 1, 2015, through Dec. 31, 2016. We plan to share future updates on our efforts to combat violent extremism by including them in this new section of our transparency report.

Twitter said it received 716 government TOS requests related to promotion of terrorism from July 1 through Dec. 31, 2016, covering 5,929 accounts, and action was taken on 85 percent of those accounts.

Overall, Twitter received a total of 6,062 government requests for information in the second half of 2016, covering 11,417 accounts, and “some information” was produced in 64 percent of those cases.

The social network received a total of 5,676 government requests for account information from January through June 2016.

Source: Agencies

risingbd/Dhaka/Mar 22, 2017/A K Azad