In its latest Transparency report, which covers requests it’s received from governments pertaining to content on its platform, Twitter has reported a big..
In its latest Transparency report, which covers requests it’s received from governments pertaining to content on its platform, Twitter has reported a big decline in the proportion of pro-terrorism accounts being reported over the past six months, saying this is down 80 per cent since its last report, as well as reporting a drop in the number of accounts it removed for terrorism-related content during this period.
Twitter claims pro-terrorism account reports have shrunk by a fifth in the past six months.
It also reports that the vast majority (95 per cent) of account suspensions pertaining to the promotion of terrorism resulted from use of its in-house tech tools, up from 74 per cent on the prior six-month report period — with government requests accounting for less than one per cent of pro-terror account suspensions.
Along with other social media platform giants, Twitter is facing increased political pressure to promptly eject terrorist content and hate speech from its platform — especially in Europe where new laws have been proposed in some countries that could see governments introducing a regime of financial penalties attached to failures of performance for social media content takedown as a stick to encourage faster removals of illegal content.
Between January and June 2017, the six-month period covered by this, Twitter’s 11th Transparency Report, the tech firm said it removed a total of 299,649 pro-terrorism accounts — surfaced by both reports from governments and its own in-house tech (though the lion’s share of identifications were generated by its tech tools).
It says this represents a 20 per cent drop in terrorism-promoting Twitter accounts since the last reporting period, of July 1,2016 through December 31,2016.
Which — coupled with the 80 per cent drop in government agencies reporting pro-terror Twitter accounts — suggests the company is at least managing to squeeze terrorist activity on its platform, given it seems unlikely there’s been such a large reduction in globally active terrorists online over the same period. (Even as there are still hundreds of thousands of pro-terrorism Twitter accounts being created every half a year.)
The company further emphasizes it killed a majority of the pro-terrorism accounts set up on its platform before they could post anything: “Notably, 75% of these accounts were suspended before posting their first Tweet,” it writes.
Which seems a big win. And a figure to watch to see if Twitter is able to further increase the proportion of non-tweeter terrorism account suspensions in its next Transparency Report.
A spokeswoman for Twitter confirmed to us that this is the first time it’s published data on “that particular metric” when we asked whether there has been a rise in Twitter being able to cut-off terrorist accounts before they’ve sent a single tweet.
“In the last six months we have seen our internal, spam-fighting tools play an increasingly valuable role in helping us get terrorist content off of Twitter,” she added. “Our anti-spam tools are getting faster, more efficient, and smarter in how we take down accounts that violate our TOS.”
The figure for total suspensions of pro-terrorism Twitter accounts is now approaching 1M over two years. (To be exact, the company reports 935,897 pro-terrorism account suspensions between August 1,2015 through June 30,2017 .)
Asked for more details about the changes it’s made to its anti-terrorism tools — to apparently deliver better results — the spokeswoman told us: “We are reluctant to share details of how these tools work as we do not want to provide information that could be used to try to avoid detection.”
“We can say that these tools enable us to take signals from accounts found to be in violation of our TOS and to work to continuously strengthen and refine the combinations of signals that can accurately surface accounts that may be similar,” she added.
Another Twitter spokesperson also pointed to a few pieces of academic research which suggest the Islamic State terror group has shifted its social media strategy from relying on Twitter’s platform to distribute violent propaganda to utilizing the messaging platform Telegram (which lets users broadcast missives to large groups).
The spokesman also made a point of flagging how the latter has been called out for a lack of co-operation by security agencies. So the company is clearly hoping to shift the big red finger of terrorism propaganda blame onto the rival Telegram messaging platform.
In this 11th edition of its Transparency Report Twitter has also expanded the categories it breaks out in the government TOS reports section (which it added in its 10th report) to now show a break down of four categories of these types of reports — namely: Abusive Behavior, Copyright, Promotion of Terrorism, and Trademark reports.
This shows that the vast majority of reports Twitter is receiving from governments relate to abusive behavior on Twitter — which it says accounted for 98 per cent of global government TOS reports it received — with pro-terrorism content a very, very distant second (accounting for around 2 per cent of the reports).
This is interesting as it underlines the huge difference in how Twitter is approaching terrorism-related content vs abusive behavior — with the vast majority (92 per cent) of accounts reported for terrorism going on to be removed by Twitter from its platform vs just 13 per cent (as Twitter reports it) of those reported for abusive behavior actually being suspended.
In the report Twitter says the fact that the vast majority of abuse-related reports resulted in no content being removed is down to “a variety of reasons” —
You could argue that terrorism is a rather easier category of content to identify than ‘abusive behavior’, with the latter representing something of a subjective spectrum when you’re talking in terms of a package of content delivered in tweet form (and of course depending on how high you dial up your ‘free speech’ setting); and likely a much more subjective spectrum vs pro-terrorism content specifically.
Though there’s no doubt Twitter is still the target of fierce criticism, including by many users, for how its platform continues to enable, for example, misogynist troll armies to pile in and harass women en masse. And such co-ordinated harassment clearly undermines the free speech rights of those being targeted. (Though Twitter has claimed to be stepping up its anti-abuse measures and tools.)
The company also continues to be criticized for racist speech on its platform. Even though its TOC expressively forbid “hateful conduct” including “on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease”.
Just this August the company was called out — in this instance by a UK parliamentary committee — for failing to act on abusive tweets, including failing to taken down graphic images of suspected rape and abuse which, its critics argue, clearly violate its own community standards — which forbid inciting or engaging in “targeted abuse or harassment of others”.
in that instance the Guardian reported that the committee chair wrote to Twitter asking it to explain its methodology and timescales for removing graphic pictures and sexually explicit messages, and also asking it to provide details of the average time taken to investigate reports and take down tweets, as well as what action is being taken to speed up removals.
