Twitter Inc., under pressure from governments around the world to combat online extremism, said in a new report that improving automation tools are helping block accounts that promote terrorism and violence.
In the first half of the year, Twitter said it suspended nearly 300,000 accounts globally linked to terrorism. Of those, roughly 95 percent were identified by the company's spam-fighting automation tools. Meanwhile, Twitter said government data requests continued to increase, and that it provided authorities with data on roughly 3,900 accounts from January to June.
The increasing role of machines in fighting extremism is a function of necessity, with manually identifying violent material within the millions of messages sent every day an impossible task.