On this Tuesday, Twitter said that it suspended 376,890 accounts in the second half of 2016 for the reason of “promotion of terrorism.” This number has a 60 percent increase over the prior six-month period.
These latest suspensions bring the total number of blocked accounts to a whopping 636,248 from August 2015, when Twitter stepped up their efforts to stop the “violent extremism,” the company has announced as part of their latest transparency report.
The actions come with the social networks under pressure from the governments around the globe to use the technology and tools to lock out terrorists and others who use these platforms to recruit and launch their attacks.
Twitter also said separately that the number of government requests for user data also rose seven percent from the previous-six-month period, but affected 13 percent fewer accounts.
For the requests to remove the content from governments and others including the copyright holders, these number of requests is up 13 percent but number of accounts fell down by 37 percent.
Twitter announced that the FBI has informed them that it was no longer under a “gag order” which prevented the disclosure of five cases which involve “national security letters” — which are special requests from the US law enforcement agency in the national security cases.
As a result of this, Twitter is now able to inform the affected users of the FBI requests.
“As we continue to push for more transparency in how we can speak about national security requests, we will update this new section in future transparency reports,” Twitter stated.
Twitter, which is pressured by certain governments to remove “hate speech,” disclosed for the first time a partnership with a third-party research group called Lumen to catalog any information removed.
Twitter said it began this agreement with Lumen in 2010.
