Twitter to crack down on violent tweets

Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) said on Tuesday that it plans to ramp up its efforts in removing any posts supporting political or religious violence.

Many social media platforms including Alphabet’s Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), have felt pressure from EU and US governments to crack down on online radicalisation and extremism.

Twitter said on Tuesday that it will rely more on software to find these tweets, rather than relying on reports from users or governments.

In the second half of 2016, Twitter suspended 377,000 accounts for “violations related to promotion of terrorism,”. Of these accounts, 74 percent were identified by “internal, proprietary spam-fighting tools,” rather than by other users.

Twitter has very strict rules against the promotion of any kind of violence on its platform. The rules read, “You may not make threats of violence or promote violence, including threatening or promoting terrorism.”

During this same period, the social media giant said they received 88 court orders from around the world asking the company to remove content posted by verified journalists and news outlets.

77 of these were from Turkey, a country which has detained tens of thousands of people after a failed coup in July. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has attempted to eradicate what he considers illegal online activity.

Twitter did not take action in response to the “great majority” of these requests.

Twitter has long been used by extremists and terrorist organisations to promote extremism. The platform has worked with groups, including People Against Violent Extremism and the Lumen project, to minimise use of the platform for discussing terrorism.

Twitter is providing copies of the underlying court orders to the Lumen project, a research project that collects and studies court orders about online content.

The company have said that it hopes to “shine a brighter light” on the requests as a threat to press freedom.