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Twitter has been engaged in a game of whack-a-mole with accounts linked to "terrorism" since 2015, and has announced that it has suspended more than 125,000 accounts as part of its efforts to "combat" extremism:
In its ongoing effort to combat violent extremism, Twitter announced Friday that it has suspended more than 125,000 accounts since mid-2015 because of what it called their connections to terrorist or extremist groups, primarily ISIS.
NPR's Aarti Shahani reports that the company says there is no "magic algorithm" to identify terrorist content on the Internet, so they're forced to make make challenging judgment calls based on "very limited information and guidance." "The company says it's trying to strike the right balance between enforcement against tweets that break the rules, the needs of law enforcement, and free expression," Aarti reports.
In a statement, Twitter also said it has "increased the size of the teams that review reports," enabling it to respond more quickly to terrorism-related posts. "We have already seen results, including an increase in account suspensions and this type of activity shifting off of Twitter," the company said.
The statement comes just weeks after a woman sued Twitter, accusing the platform of giving voice to ISIS. Tamara Fields, a Florida woman whose husband Lloyd died in a November attack on a police training center in Amman, Jordan, said Twitter "knowingly let the militant Islamist group use its network to spread propaganda, raise money and attract recruits," according to the complaint. The suit also alleged that "ISIS members use Twitter to post instructional guidelines and promotional videos, referred to as 'mujatweets.'"
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(Score: 2, Disagree) by gnuman on Saturday February 06 2016, @04:42PM
Why in the holy **** would Twitter be ever considered a Common Carrier?? They are a website, not an ISP!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier#Telecommunications [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 06 2016, @07:48PM
Common carrier may be the incorrect name, but the reason that Twitter should not editorialize their content is so that they keep the DMCA safe harbor provision. Once they begin editorializing / censoring certain viewpoints then they could lose the DMCA safe harbor protection which prevents Twitter from being held responsible for the content of their "website".
They are a website, not an ISP!
Hint: Websites don't have 140 char limits. What you're using is the front end of a telecommunications company's SMS message relay network. So, want to rethink that "it's not a common carrier" crap again? Common carrier applies to telecommunications service companies, not ISPs. In fact, FCC wanted to classify ISPs as title II so they do fall under common carrier laws, but have failed to do so because of blowback from lobbyists who influence the FCC's purse strings indirectly.