Twitter Banned Accounts: Platform Suspends More Than 636,000 Extremist Users

Twitter’s latest transparency report shows it has been cracking down on extremists. The platform said Tuesday it has suspended more than 636,000 accounts between Aug. 1, 2015 and Dec. 31, 2016.

In the last six months of 2016, Twitter suspended nearly 377,000 accounts for “violations related to promotion of terrorism,” the company said.

“Of those suspensions, 74% consisted of accounts surfaced by internal, proprietary spam-fighting tools,” Twitter added.

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The platform said government requests accounted for only two percent of all suspensions in the last half of 2016.

Besides addressing extremism, Twitter has announced various measures to curb online abuse and hate content on its platform lately.

Last year, Twitter banned Milo Yiannopoulos, former editor at Breitbart, after he attacked Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones. In November 2016, Twitter also suspended numerous alt-right accounts, including that of white nationalist Richard Spencer (his account was reinstated about a month later).

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The company has implemented numerous anti-abuse approaches, including new filtering options for notifications and the ability to mute from the home timeline and letting users decide how long they want specific content muted. Twitter also vowed to keep users updated on reports they have made concerning abusive accounts.

The platform introduced other changes last year and earlier this year, which included stopping the creation of new abusive accounts by banned users, strengthening safer search results and hiding “potentially abusive or low-quality Tweets.”