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Twitter Tackles Terrorists In Targeted Takedown (betanews.com)

Posted by timothy on from the anthill-vs-hurricane dept.

Mark Wilson writes: Having previously battled trolls, Twitter has now turned its attention to terrorists and their supporters. The site has closed down more than 125,000 accounts associated with terrorism since the middle of 2015, it announced in a statement. Although a full breakdown of figures is not provided, Twitter says most of these accounts were related to ISIS. Having increased the size of its account review team, the site has reduced the time it takes to investigate accounts that are reported, and has also started to investigate 'accounts similar to those reported'.

1 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Just another reason to #RIPTwitter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is all part of a larger trend of Twitter becoming increasing irrelevant, but much more interesting to me is the #RIPTwitter hashtag and Twitter's burying of it.

    For everyone who hasn't been following Twitter recently, Twitter has announced that they're getting rid of the reverse chronological timeline and will be switching everyone over to an "algorithm-based curated out-of-order timeline" some time next week - essentially that horrible thing Facebook did to force companies to pay money to make their posts visible at the cost of real people having their posts buried. (It's the reason why that picture of your family will never show up but you'll routinely see posts from McDonald's, solely because one of your friends hit "like" on McDonald's years ago.) As part of this move, they're also no longer marking promoted tweets and hashtags as "promoted," instead they'll just be mixed in with everything else.

    This has prompted a backlash and people started tweeting "RIP Twitter" - until Twitter blackholed tweets containing that phrase. So #RIPTwitter started trending instead. And then Twitter blackholed that as well, even though it was nearing a million tweets.

    What we're watching is Twitter slowly cave in to the demands of advertisers at the expense of users. First it started going after "trolls" in an effort to prevent bad press. Now it's going after terrorists in a similar bid. Next up it will be actively filtering what we get to see on Twitter, and who knows what biases that's going to be enforcing, but based on what it chooses to run in Twitter Moments, the one thing we can be sure of is that it will be biased.

    All in the name of promoting advertisers who all pretty much agree that Twitter is useless as an advertising platform.

    #RIPTwitter.