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.

Comments

Contra-Number?

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re: Contra-Number?

[tsqr]

White, Western European Christians crushed those who said things they found unpleasant and many cultures have standards of free speech from the longhouse to the forum.

He was talking about where the concept of free speech originated (Athens, ca. 5th century BC). He didn't say it was a concept exclusive to white western Europe,

Re: Contra-Number?

[Anonymous Coward]

Christianity was widely practiced in Athens during that time? Please tell me more.

Re: Contra-Number?

[AutodidactLabrat]

Wish I had some points to give you.
Seriously, these white christian power people give stupid a bad reputation!

Nannybot 2016

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Freedom of speech

[danbob999]

So twitter is against freedom of speech?

Re:Freedom of speech

[Tablizer]

The terrorists should declare themselves corporations, THEN they'll get freedom-of-speech.

Re:Freedom of speech

[Kierthos]

The First Amendment guarantees that the government will not abridge your freedom of speech. (Certain limitations, among them threatening public officials, still apply.)

It says nothing about private entities, such as corporations, being prohibited from abridging your speech.

Look at it like this. Freedom of speech does not guarantee you a venue. It guarantees you a voice. No one has to listen, and no one is obligated to provide you a microphone.

You can say what you want, but Twitter still has the option under their Terms of Service to ban you. You can still say the same things; you just can't say them on their service.

Re:Freedom of speech

[danbob999]

I don't live in the US so I couldn't care less about its constitution.
Freedom of speech is not only a law (in many countries). It's also a principle. Twitter is free not to stand by that principle. They just better never say they defend and promote it.

Re:Freedom of speech

[zedaroca]

I understand your point and agree partially with it. Since I'm Brazilian, and grew with different laws and slightly different values, I'll make some points that might add to the subject.
We had a dictatorship not long ago and our post-dictatorship constitution and laws developed in a way that if you are in the communication business you cannot choose what people say. If some speech is illegal (like racism or crime incitement), then you should either get a court order to remove it (pretty fast), or alert the authorities and if they do their job, they'll order the take down.
That is, if you have a house, you choose what people can write in the wall. If you have a newspaper, you choose what you publish. But if you have a phone company, you cannot choose what's in people's sms messages or calls. The same applies for Facebook, etc, that are effectively replacing the phone companies.

No one thinks or claims (here) that an user's tweet expresses Tweeter's opinion or something they agree with. Hosting someone's opinion is not agreeing with it. If you don't want to host certain opinions, you should be in the publishing market, not in the communications market (here with our laws, that match my opinion, and of those that are against this kind of private censorship).

The logic is that as means of association and communications change, people should still be able to associate and communicate, as long as they are not doing anything illegal. Otherwise we would let private entities that get a prominent position in the communications market choose what people say and, by consequence, think. We don't consider this an infringement of other rights, on the contrary, because of the position they get in the market. Being banned from these communication services is a severe limitation on one's association and speech capabilities.

The upside on this position is that we can be subjected to gays, weapons, abortions, terrorists, republicans, democrats, etc on the communication services we effectively use, and end up thinking about the issues and the points they present. In American law to achieve something similar to what we have I think you'd have to regulate these communication platforms as utilities (IANAL, think based on the net neutrality debate).

Re:First they came..

[Coren22]

Because clearly, promoting violence as a means of getting your way politically is totally equivalent to that quote.

BullShit

[frovingslosh]

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.

235,000?

[BringsApples]

I don't tweet, but I wonder what percentage of their user base that is. Maybe it's small, but I wonder what that does to the attitude of investors, and/or those looking to sell ads. This number seems really high.

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.

Al Qaeda Inc. documents its expenses

[tepples]

You think al Qaeda isn't a corporation? Someone read its expense reports.

Re:Al Qaeda Inc. documents its expenses

[Thud457]

Still better customer service than Comcast.

Re:Trump's account is still active...

[tepples]

I don't want to waste my vote on either of them, which is why I donated to Gov. Gary Johnson's campaign.

Re:Trump's account is still active...

[Rob Y.]

It's more like - do you want a professional, equivocating, truth-shading, politician, or an amateur, flat-out liar who says completely insane shit all the time along with its complete opposite from minute to minute.

This Hillary and Trump are 'both liars' argument is a big part of the reason Hillary lies - and used a private email server in the first place. She's a 'liar' to the extent that you can play gotcha with things she says - and many do and have. And she tried to hide her email to prevent it from becoming fodder for the same gotcha games. But as a President, she's essentially pursuing the policies she says she is. As a President, God help us, Trump would be a blank slate, pursuing God knows what. The only thing we do know about him is that he'll say anything and it's polar opposite if you allow him to keep talking and give him enough time.

Re:Not true at all

[rtb61]

The difference between online and normal social engagements is you are connected to a far broader and more diverse range of people ie in my younger days, regional towns in queensland had black hotels and white hotels and you did not go into the wrong hotel unless you wanted problems (this being a more extreme form of social separation, another extreme form being in prison versus not being in prison). What the online environment does to push many differing social groups to interacting together. So the problem with twitter is not the bullshit on twitter, the problem is the problems on twitter are spreading beyond twitter ie other communications channels spreading twitter madness. Want twitter to be less problematic simply ignore it, do not re-report anything from it, do not participate in it, let them climb their outrage trees and scream at each other all they want. If it shifts from screaming on twitter to actual confrontations let the police deal with it. From the beginning of twitter everyone was told exactly how it would turn out and all the problems associated with it and that it was best to leave it alone. The Marketdroids got hold of it and made it worse by linking it to main stream media as another marketing and public relations channel and made it far worse. Simply drop twitter.