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Twitter ( TWTR ) said on Friday that it has suspended more than 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist attacks, mainly related to ISIS, marking the first time that Twitter has revealed the scale of terrorist-related activity on its service. Twitter made the announcement as public debate grows on what government and business can do to spot potential security threats in advance and stop the Islamic State terror group from recruiting new members online. Twitter provided the news in a tweet from its @Policy team linking to its blog post on the topic. “Since the middle of 2015 alone, we’ve suspended over 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts , primarily related to ISIS,” the blog post said. “We condemn the use of Twitter to promote terrorism.” Since mid-2015, we have suspended over 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts. Read more here: https://t.co/FQJeOTtPLz — Policy (@policy) February 5, 2016 Twitter also said that it has made other efforts to intercept terrorist communications on its site, including increasing the size of the teams that review reports, a move that Twitter said has “significantly” reduced its response time. “We also look into other accounts similar to those reported and leverage proprietary spam-fighting tools to surface other potentially violating accounts for review by our agents. We have already seen results, including an increase in account suspensions and this type of activity shifting off of Twitter,” the social media site’s blog post said. In a report last year, the Brookings Institution think tank estimated that ISIS supporters used at least 46,000 and up to 70,000 Twitter accounts between September and December 2014. “The Islamic State, known as ISIS or ISIL, has exploited social media, most notoriously Twitter, to send its propaganda and messaging out to the world and to draw in people vulnerable to radicalization,” the Brookings report said. The 125,000 figure that Twitter released Friday implied that either Twitter has been able to step up its terrorist identifications on its social network or that ISIS and its supporters have drastically increased their presence on it since 2014. Twitter’s announcement follows a controversy over the role of social media in the lives of the apparently ISIS-inspired team that killed 14 people in an attack in San Bernardino, Calif., in December. Ultimately, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that the husband-and-wife terror team did not post pro-jihad sentiments publicly on social media before the attack but sent them in private message communications. Like many of its peers, Twitter regularly publishes a transparency report showing content removed and user data handed over at the request of various governments, including the United States. Twitter stock closed at 15.72, down 7%. Scalper1 News
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