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Twitter Tackles Terrorists In Targeted Takedown (betanews.com)

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'.

16 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Too Many T's Timothy by rossdee · · Score: 3, Funny

    firsT posT

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

    Holy alliteration Batman!!

    We need more of that.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:LOL ... by Toad-san · · Score: 2

      Replacing "In" with "Through", of course.

  3. 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. Re:freedom (but only for those we like) by Rujiel · · Score: 2

      "It's a war." Oh really? Except In THIS "war", the US and its allies (especially Saudi Arabia) are the ones who engineered the enemy--specifically, the US sought to engender fundamentalism in the arab world in order to battle those godless soviets, and now the birds have come home to roost. All the while Turkey and the Saudis very openly arm ISIS while we look the other way. So spare me your "this is war' WWII analogy bullshit.

    4. Re:freedom (but only for those we like) by KGIII · · Score: 2

      While I disagree, entirely, with the OP AC, pointing out where you think the fault lies does not actually make it any less a war. Your "rebuttal" is a nice rant and all but not really salient.

      Also, it's fun to blame the US but I'd suggest you study some history - the problem goes back *much* further. Instead of blaming the colonization and arbitrary borders put in place by the League of Nations or the United States or even the USSR - how about we, you know, blame the people who are *actually* causing the problems? You know, the people cutting off heads, blowing people up, and setting off bombs? I dunno but I think the culpability lies with the people committing atrocities.

      Yeah, I know... That means holding people accountable for their individual actions and laying the blame on the poor impoverished, uneducated, and disenfranchised souls. That's terrible and not exactly politically correct but the reality is, they're cutting off people's heads. No, no... It's convenient to blame the US (and ignore history which points to much bigger problem creators) and to rant and be a right-minded soul. But me? No... I'm gonna blame the people who cut off heads for cutting off heads.

      At any rate, it's no less a war just because you'd like to point to some cause le jour and feel better about yourself. But, you knew that. Well, maybe you didn't. You do now. And no, the blame lies squarely on the folks committing the atrocities and not the League of Nations or even the interference due to the colonization by Europeans and it's not even the fault of the church and the Crusades. It's not even the fault of Mohamed for spreading his religion north and then outwards. No, it's the fault of the people chopping off heads. But, you knew that...

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    5. Re:freedom (but only for those we like) by Rujiel · · Score: 2

      "pointing out where you think the fault lies does not actually make it any less a war"

      I wasn't simply pointing out "where the fault lies", because that implies that this rash of fundamentalism is some sort of unintended consequence. Although you could claim that it was unintended regarding our coup of Mossadegh, it certainly is not true of our more recent targets. Saddam? Secular. Gaddafi? Secular. Assad? Secular. ISIS, on the other hand, we handled with kid gloves until Russia got around to bombing them (not to mention a lot of civilians as well).

      There are plenty of examples of the pentagon struggling with this administration--having intelligence altered, targets removed from eligibility for bombing, etc.

      http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...

      http://www.usatoday.com/story/...

      Of course, this comes not long after our arming of Al Nusra and other extremists in Syria from 2009 onward in a continued attempt to topple Assad.

      So, put simply, the idea that this is a "war" against fundamentalist islam is laughable. (You might as well try to tell me how drugs are the enemy in our war on drugs, when they're actually the war's greatest friend--without the drugs, there would be no war!) In recent times, rather, our goal has been to engender fundamentalism in the western world such that we may have an excuse to intervene. This was the most salient--since you like that word--point of my comment, which you didn't address at all. Even today the west's strongest ally is Saudi Arabia, the monarchy of which pushes Wahabism, which is just as extreme as any variety of fundamentalist islam that the US could purport to be fighting.

      You act as if a rash of state-sponsored fundamentalism sparked up on its own in the Muslim world, as if through some stimuli among savages that we noble westerners could never hope to understand--a very shortsighted and deliberately simple view.

      Actually, the *easy* thing to do would be to claim that those on the other side of the world have a problem, and that our government represents us or always has our best interests in mind--as if we are in the seat of power. The *difficult* thing to do would be to admit that the US' military actions are caused by ripples in a deep state which neither you nor I nor even the president has control over. So your notion that just blaming "the west" is a way of standing up and dusting off our hands is pretty silly--it actually means that WE have a problem, and that WE have work to do.

      So you can spare me your "so easy to blame the west" spiel.

  4. twitter free to censor & obey western establis by sittingnut · · Score: 2

    twitter is private so it is in fact free to do as it wishes. twitter can be the prosecution, judge, and executioner, in a private space owned by it

    but all people who love freedom will note well and remember , that by this action it is freely indicating that what it wishes is to do is to obey the western secular 'liberal' establishment and its agenda, same that is invading countries, looting resources, running torture camps, sanctioning coups, drone killing children, spying on everyone, etc etc,. twitter is willing to judge and brand those who disagree with that agenda (in its privately owned property), and perhaps sometimes advocate violent resistance to that agenda, as 'terrorists' ( note however that no physical violence is taking place in twitter and accounts of those who are convicted through due legal process of such violence elsewhere are not the issue here )

    now we know twitter is a willing tool of some nasty people. just as twitter is free to cac like this, we are free to show contempt for that action, (unless we are ourselves specimens of lowest form of humanity to support what twitter is supporting)

  5. First they came for... by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Funny

    First they came for the trolls...I didn't care because I wasn't a troll.
    Then they came for the terrorists...I didn't care because I wasn't a terrorist.
    Then they came for the guys with ironic beards...and I started caring.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

    --
    Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
  8. "Terrorists" by Dereck1701 · · Score: 2

    I wonder what their definition of 'terrorists' is, somehow I bet it isn't quite what people are thinking. When the US was bombing the heck out of Iraq/Afghanistan they simply labeled everyone that they killed as "terrorists". When it started to come to light that women and pre teen children were included in those numbers they did finally limit their tally, to including anyone they killed who was armed, including reporters with large scary cameras.

  9. They missed one by troll+-1 · · Score: 3, Funny

    CIA account is still active.

  10. Re:We are returning to the dark ages. by ShaunC · · Score: 2

    While there are plenty of muslim and Christian crackpots,o only the muslims kill, torture, rape, burn, etc. women and children indiscriminately.

    Tell that to the victims of abortion clinic bombings.

    --
    Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!