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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'.

5 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. LOL ... by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Holy alliteration Batman!!

    We need more of that.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  2. freedom (but only for those we like) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Of course twitter is a private service and can have whatever policies it wants. But when the whole world communicates with about 2 total services like that, silencing someone there is tantamount to complete censorship. It makes them go underground, where their message of hate becomes even harder to combat.

    No, it's best to shine a bright light on their bullshit. Let them say it all they want. The right answer to offensive speech is (1) more speech that makes it clear how fucked up their world view is, and (2) giving people good ways to chose what they listen to, but putting that power in their own hands, not having a central authority decide what is acceptable and what is not.

    Turning the internet into something controlled and "safe" is not a good idea, no matter how nasty the speech in question. But we're now centralizing all communication on Twitter and Facebook. The power to do this to ISIS is the power to do it to political dissidents and human rights activists and politically inconvenient people. We should think very, very carefully about what it means to give just a few companies that much control over how literally billions of people communicate.

    1. Re:freedom (but only for those we like) by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This. Exactly this.

      The correct answer to people spouting bullshit is to call out their bullshit. Don't silence them by squelching them, silence them by showing them that they are wrong, that they are not the "vocal minority that dares to say what others only think", but that they are a loudmouth few who babble what everyone else knows is BULLSHIT.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:freedom (but only for those we like) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      when the whole world communicates with about 2 total services

      The problem are not Twitter's policies, the problem is we rely on 2 services, that happen to be proprietary and non-compatible with competitors, effectively preventing competition to appear.

  3. Propaganda by MrL0G1C · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "The site has closed down more than 125,000 accounts associated with terrorism"

    ^ This, folks is what's known as propaganda and it's utter BS.

    It doesn't take more than a couple of seconds of logical thought to realise that either the 125,000 number is wrong or the accounts are not associated with terrorism, unless you include talking about terrorism to mean 'associated with terrorism'

    It's sad that people fall for this kind of crap.

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    Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.