Twitter Says It's Suspended 125K Accounts for Terrorism

Twitter announced Friday that it has booted more than 125,000 terror-related accounts from its social-media platform since the middle of last year, CNBC reports. The accounts were suspended for supporting terrorist attacks or for threatening to carry out attacks. "Like most people around the world, we are horrified by the atrocities perpetrated by extremist groups," Twitter says in a statement. "We condemn the use of Twitter to promote terrorism." This is the first time Twitter has ever acknowledged the amount of terror-related activity on its platform. According to CBS News, the announcement comes a month after the White House sent officials to Silicon Valley to ask the tech industry to help in the fight against terrorism.

Twitter claims it is devoting more resources to investigating terrorist activity and is using "spam-fighting algorithms" to suss out terror-related accounts. "We have already seen results, including an increase in account suspensions and this type of activity shifting off of Twitter," the company says. But a report from the Brookings Institute issued last year states terrorists moving off Twitter and onto a "less transparent platform," as CBS puts it, could have troubling consequences. ISIS has used Twitter in the past to recruit members from English-speaking nations and spread its message. The majority of terror-related accounts suspended by Twitter in recent months were shut down for supporting ISIS. (More Twitter stories.)