Twitter suspends over 450k accounts for child sexual exploitation, 44,974 for promoting terrorism

Microblogging social media platform, Twitter has said it suspended over 450,000 accounts for violating its child sexual exploitation rules.

It also suspended a total number of 44,974 accounts for promoting terrorism on the platform.

The microblogging platform revealed this on Tuesday in a report, which also disclosed that in the six month period covered by the report, it received 43,387 legal demands to remove content.

According to a report in TheNewsGuru.com (TNG), Twitter stated that the demands to remove content specified 196,878 accounts and that account holders were asked to remove 4.7 million tweets that violated the Twitter Rules.

The report reads in part: “In terms of legal demands from governments, in the six month period covered in this report, Twitter received 43,387 legal demands to remove content, specifying 196,878 accounts.

“This is the largest number of accounts ever subject to removal requests in a reporting period since releasing our first transparency report in 2012.

“Of the total global volume of legal demands, 95% originated from only five countries (in decreasing order): Japan, Russia, Turkey, India, and South Korea.

“We withheld or required account holders to remove some or all of the reported content in response to 54% of these global legal demands.

“Twitter required account holders to remove 4.7M Tweets that violated the Twitter Rules. Of the Tweets removed, 68% received fewer than 100 impressions prior to removal, with an additional 24% receiving between 100 and 1,000 impressions.

“In total, impressions on these violative Tweets accounted for less than 0.1% of all impressions for all Tweets during that time period.

“In these six months, Twitter permanently suspended 453,754 unique accounts for violations of our child sexual exploitation (CSE) policy — 89% of those accounts were proactively identified and removed by deploying a range of internal tools and/or by utilizing the industry hash sharing (e.g., PhotoDNA) prior to any reports filed via the designated CSE reporting channel.

“In Q1 2021, Twitter suspended 44,974 unique accounts for promotion of terrorism and violent organizations — 93% of those accounts were proactively identified and removed”.

Twitter stated in the report that there was an overall downward trend in the number of violating accounts, which it said is likely due to changing behaviors of these actors coupled with continued improvements of its defenses.