In a February 2016 statement, Twitter acknowledged that the terrorist threat was changing and said it was adapting to the changes. The company announced that it had suspended more than 125,000 accounts since mid-2015 “for threatening or promoting terrorist acts” and enlarged the teams that review reports related to terrorism. When pertinent, Twitter also says it cooperates with law-enforcement agencies and works with organizations to combat extremist content online. In August, Twitter said it suspended an additional 235,000 accounts associated with terrorism.
But we believe that Twitter doesn’t do enough to proactively monitor, identify and remove terrorist-related accounts and hasn’t made an effective or prolonged effort to ensure that the accounts are not re-established. In short, Twitter’s actions are too little, too late.
Hany Farid, the chairman of the computer science department at Dartmouth College, has suggested one way Twitter could do more. He developed software that can track extremist content on the internet, according to Bloomberg. It could be used to automatically block terrorist-related posts on social media.
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