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Twitter Has Suspended 235,000 Accounts Since February For Promoting Terrorism (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Twitter has suspended 235,000 accounts since February for promoting terrorism, the company said in a blog post today. "Daily suspensions are up over 80 percent since last year, with spikes in suspensions immediately following terrorist attacks," the company wrote. "Our response time for suspending reported accounts, the amount of time these accounts are on Twitter, and the number of followers they accumulate have all decreased dramatically." The company said it's also expanded the team that works on flagging such content, and claims to have made progress on stopping accounts from starting again under a new handle. In a previous post from February, Twitter said it had suspended 125,000 accounts since mid-2015.
And how many people has it silenced who are against terrorism?
I'd be more impressed if they didn't seem to have a little club that used a small cabal to decide who should be banned and who not... real trolls roam free on Twitter while people deviating from Group-Think are banned. It makes me question if the numbers they give are even real or just for show.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm against the promotion of terrorism and all that, but do we really want tech companies policing our speech?
This would like someone listening to all our telephone conversations to see if we were talking about terrorism. Oh, wait...
Great, after they're done we can stop them from continuing.
As good as this xkcd: http://xkcd.com/937/
So twitter is against freedom of speech?
It's a good thing that there are absolutely zero terrorism-promoters who might have some level of familiarity with basic automated spamming techniques.
Otherwise this would seem pretty futile.
But Trump's account is still active... Along with Clinton's. There got both sides of the crooked fence for you guys. Sorry, but neither are Presidential material. But Clinton is a professional and Trump is a child.
not really
...that Trump's account was deleted?
What about all the horrorists out there? Who will stop their scourge of horror? I'm personally most worried about the 'discomfortists', day by day they erode the fabric of everyday human comforts and conveniences... Damn them... Damn them to hechell...
Because the Shashdot FBI, you know, is domestic terrorism
First they came for the terrorist supporters, and I did not speak up because I was not a terrorist supporter.
They have suspended conservative posters simply because of posts of those people's followers, but they let ISIS supporters like Anjem Choudary continue to post.
And while they might pretend to take some actions against terrorism. they seem to be doing nothing to silence posts promoting tourism.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
...a good chunk of those suspensions were liberal SJW millennial brats crying that people quoting Donald Trump was promoting terrorism? I wouldn't put it past them since the left is scared shitless they're losing thanks to having the most corrupt candidate in history.
Yes, i know they are not obligated in any way, but i also am not obligated to use a service from a company who does not honor the concept. Personally, 'rights' are absolute and in the case of freedom of speech; Even if what you say i disagree with, i still support your right to say it.
Banning speech just moves it from one platform to another
I'd rather honestly know who the assholes are, instead of banning them and having them go underground.
The best counter of hate speech is more speech.
The best disinfectant for a society is the light of day.
Where free speech is banned? This is why I would never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever use twitter
The company said it's also expanded the team that works on flagging such content, and claims to have made progress on stopping accounts from starting again under a new handle.
Doubtful. This is equivalent to pissing on a forest fire.
In other news, in the condition that the world is in these days, all that's going on, simply talking about what's happening, and sharing your thoughts makes it hard for others to NOT be able to look at what's been said as terror.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
You think al Qaeda isn't a corporation? Someone read its expense reports.
the fucktard mideast. That should take care of 90% of them.
I think a lot worse is done by our war promoting hate promoting mainstream media...
There was an article 3 days ago on slashdot on how twitter promotes uncensored free speech. Looks like that was all a lie.
After all, hinting that gun owners might take matters into their own hands IF Hillary is elected (the time ordering and meaning of his sentences was very clear) sounds like promoting anarchy, treason, and terrorism to me.
Also, if he asserts that Obama is the "founder of ISIS" then he has to acknowledge that he wanted to "found ISIS" in exactly the same way as he clearly an unequivocally stated in TWO CNN interviews. So let's call him -- by his own standards -- a "co-founder of ISIS".
One can then work one's way down through whether or not calling for a "wall" to be built between the US and Mexico, prohibiting immigration of all Muslims, etc counts as "promoting terrorism" in the same sense that drawing Mohammed having relations with a camel or insulting whole swaths of the US population by calling them rapists and thieves might promote, rather than extinguish, acts of terror-level violence.
No? Political speech and hence protected? Then precisely what IS the difference between this sort of twittering and public speaking and expressing extreme annoyance at the United States in general and Trump in particular?
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
I would really like to see something like this, of the banned accounts by geolocation.
People who deviate from group-think are banned in real-life too.
People have real discussions all the time in public, at bars, at work - they are not banned, there is real conversation and people listen to each other (to a point). Even if you end up totally disagreeing with someone, you still carry on with them as an co--worker or a friend - I have many friends who are utterly in disagreement with a number of things I believe in, but we both just carry on knowing the other person is wrong.
If you don't know anyone who disagrees with you, then I feel very sorry for you indeed. But that's the lives of most people, no-one agrees with everything someone else thinks and we all learn to get by with it.
The difference is that online people are simply less tolerant, and vastly more closed minded. It's a shame to see Twitter codify that and bake in a preference in a matter that people are very much split 50/50 on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
was calling for terror, but FBook seems to.
Nobody ever has said "yeah, I am a terrorist".
Lots of people have said they were terrorists. In Paris, Brussels, Nice, Ankara, and a few other places you may have read about recently, they said it with guns, bombs, and grenades.
Obvious disinfo like this just makes the truth clear: The "FBI trolls" currently infesting this site this site are actually operating on behalf of ISIS and FSB.
If you know someone is a dick irl you (almost always) don't go getting the person banned, you take steps to avoid exposure, and protect friends from expose as well. That way you all build up your "social dick list"
Twitter should be maintaining their own dick list, so these dicks can post without anyone else seeing. If someone specifically searches for a dick account and follows, boom, you're on the dick list.
Now I'm sure it'd be possible to tell if you were 'dicked', but it'd be much harder than simply seeing the 'account suspended' message.
Twitter should create a separate platform for undesirables like trolls and terrorists and transfer their accounts to it.
They can call it TWATter.
I’ll be here all week folks. Don’t forget to tip your servers. Da dum tss
This is deeply disturbing.
A private company is divining which of its users are in some way expressing opinions that it thinks might be divergent with that of the government of the country in which t operates?
This is far beyond an act of fascism. Twitter did this of its own accord, not at the request of government. Twitter per-emptively bowed in obeisance due to its fear of a government demand,
If you do not find this disturbing, then you have not read enough history.