Twitter suspended over 5,000 accounts during June 26-July 25 for ‘promoting terrorism’

Twitter suspended more than 5,000 accounts between June 26 and July 25—using proactive monitoring tools—for promoting terrorism, the social media company said in its latest compliance report, as mandated by the country’s IT Rules. 

In the same time period and using the same automated tools, Twitter also suspended more than 26,000 accounts over the issue of child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity,  the company said.

“Twitter does not tolerate any material that features or promotes child sexual exploitation — whether in Direct Messages or elsewhere throughout the service. This includes media, text, illustrations, or computer-generated images,” Twitter said in its report. 

“A vast majority of all accounts that are suspended for the promotion of terrorism and child sexual exploitation are proactively flagged by a combination of technology and other purpose-built internal proprietary tools,” the company added.

It is worth noting that the figures for account suspensions using proactive monitoring tools represent global actions taken. The company did not disclose India-specific numbers for its proactive action on problematic content and accounts. 

The IT Rules which came into effect from May 26 mandate companies like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to publish a compliance report every month mentioning the details of complaints received and action taken.  

Under the rules, the companies also have to reveal the number of specific communication links or parts of information that they removed following proactive monitoring using automated tools. 

Twitter received 120 grievances from Indian users and took action on 167 links. The highest number of links that were “actioned” on by the company contained abuse/harassment and IP-related infringements - 46 links each. That was followed by privacy infringements (35), impersonation (16) and defamation (15). 

Twitter also took action on 7 links that contained misinformation or synthetic and manipulated media and one link each for containing sensitive adult content and hateful conduct.

On top of that, the company also processed 67 grievances from Indian users who appealed account suspensions. Twitter said these grievances were all resolved and it overturned 24 of the account suspensions based on the specifics of the situation, but the other accounts remain suspended.

The social media platform said each grievance may contain multiple items. 

As per the company’s previous and maiden compliance report, between May 26, 2021, and June 25, 2021, Twitter took action on over 130 links, a majority of which were related to defamation.