The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Technology Twitter

Twitter’s honed AI tools silence 300,000 terror accounts

Author

By John Glenday, Reporter

September 20, 2017 | 2 min read

Twitter's latest transparency report has revealed that it has silenced close to 300,000 accounts promoting terror in the first six months of the year, 95% of which were taken down after being flagged up by Twitter’s own artificial intelligence tools designed to weed out such accounts.

Twitter

Twitter’s honed AI tools silence 300,000 terror accounts

Twitter is engaged in a charm offensive to persuade US and European authorities that it is fully engaged in the fight against terrorism, prompting it to invest in technologies capable of rooting out trolls terrorist sympathisers and people engaged in hate speech.

Twitter’s claims are backed up by extremism researcher Maura Conway at Vox-pol, who wrote: “Our research shows that Twitter is no longer a conducive space for IS supporters. Twitter’s aggressive pro-IS account takedown activity means that the once vibrant and extensive IS Twitter network is now almost non-existent.”

The latest figures underline the importance of algorithms in defeating terrorists with the number of accounts suspended by software rather than humans jumping from just 74% in the previous six months as AI’s become more adept at culling content.

Indeed Twitter suspended 20% fewer accounts than it did over the previous six months, a factor attributed to the swift removal of terror accounts as soon as they emerge, with 75% scrubbed before issuing a single tweet.

Twitter first revealed that it would be harnessing algorithms to tackle abusive tweets in a blog post earlier this year.

Technology Twitter

More from Technology

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +