Twitter suspends 125,000 terrorism related accounts

However, accounts of India-centric terrorist organizations and individuals remained untouched

Twitter has suspended over 125,000 accounts, most of them linked to the Islamic State militant group, "for threatening or promoting terrorist acts" even as handles of India-centric terrorist organizations and individuals on the micro-blogging site remain untouched.

In a blog, the US-based firm said, "As the nature of the terrorist threat has changed, so has our ongoing work in this area. Since the middle of 2015 alone, we've suspended over 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS".

Twitter, however, did not respond to questions about the accounts of terrorist organizations operating from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Notably, Hafeez Muhamad Saeed, the mastermind of 26/11 Mumbai attack, has been openly calling for carrying out brazen attack against India in his latest tweet on February 3.

Twitter condemned the use of its platform to promote terrorism and said the 'Twitter Rules' make it clear that this type of behaviour, or any violent threat, is not permitted on its service.

The company said it has increased its report reviewing teams to react faster.

"We also look into other accounts similar to those reported and leverage proprietary spam-fighting tools to surface other potentially violating accounts for review by our agents. We have already seen results, including an increase in account suspensions and this type of activity shifting off of Twitter," it said.

In a move to intensify its push against extremist posts, Twitter has partnered with respected organizations such as People Against Violent Extremism (PAVE) and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

It also attended government-convened summits on CVE hosted by the White House, the Australian Attorney-General's Department, the UK government, the French Prime Minister, the European Commission, and the United Nations.

As many experts and other companies have noted, there is no magic algorithm for identifying terrorist content on the Internet, so global online platforms are forced to make challenging judgement calls based on very limited information and guidance, the company said.

In spite of these challenges, we will continue to aggressively enforce our Rules in this area, and engage with authorities and other relevant organizations to find solutions to this critical issue and promote powerful counter-speech narratives, Twitter said.