Twitter halts thousands of accounts it says promote terrorism

A month before that, the Brookings Institution came out with a report that found Twitter had deleted at least 1,000 ISIS supporting accounts, and possibly many more, within a four month period.

“Addressing the use of social media by terrorists will require a sustained and cooperative effort between the technology sector, the Intelligence Community, and law enforcement”, he said.

The suspensions are not automatic. In a closed-door meeting last month in San Jose with U.S. national security officials, she and other technology executives discussed the idea of using an algorithm to try and automatically flag Isis content. According to the company, it has since seen “this type of activity shifting off of Twitter”.

People have been calling on Twitter to crack down on terror-connected accounts for a while now. 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 company has boosted the number of people it has assigned to reviewing reports of suspicious accounts and has cooperated with law enforcement, it said, when appropriate. These automated accounts can sometimes be caught with tools normally used to fight spam.

Saying that IS has 50,000 Twitter accounts, Mr Wainwright told a BBC radio investigation: ‘We’ve built our counter-terrorist capability in recent years very much on the basis of being able to monitor their communications.

Under pressure from the USA government to crack down on the abuse of such platforms by groups like ISIL, tech companies are dedicating increasingly more resources to tracking reports of violent threats.

“Global online platforms are forced to make challenging judgment calls based on very limited information and guidance”, the company said.

Earlier this year, ISIS militants have hit back at hacking collective Anonymous” attempts at declaring a cyber war, branding them “idiots’. The Florida woman is seeking damages for allegedly violating the Anti-Terrorism Act by providing material support to terrorists.

This is the first time that the popular micro blogging service has revealed the scale of terrorist activity on its service.