Twitter removed more than 270,000 accounts around the world for promoting terrorism in the second half of 2017, according to the company’s latest transparency report. The number of accounts permanently suspended for sharing what the firm called extremist content between July and December represents a drop for the second period in a row.

The social network puts this down to “years of hard work making our site an undesirable place for those seeking to promote terrorism”. Nick Pickles, Twitter UK’s head of public policy, said: “The overwhelming majority of these accounts were detected by our own technology, with just 0.2% of the accounts we suspended in 2017 being flagged by the police.” Almost 75% of accounts were suspended before they sent their first tweet, according to the report, and 93% were discovered by tools that Twitter engineers had built.

Twitter is understood to also use a combination of US and EU lists of terrorist organisations as well as research from academics and experts to identify terrorists on its network. The number of reports of abusive behaviour submitted by government representatives also dropped amid a marked change in the type of abusive behaviour reported. Two-thirds of the 10,000 reports concerned violated rules over impersonation, with only 16% of the reports for harassment and 12% for hateful conduct. Harassment and hateful conduct each accounted for a third of reported accounts in the first half of 2017.(theguardian)…[+]