As the world gets more and more taken with social networks and their effects on the life of the average man on the street grows in footprint, unfair and harmful usage of the platform has also grown in size and seriousness. And while Facebook and Google have recently taken multiple efforts to curb the promotion of hatred and terrorism on its platform, Twitter has been surprisingly quiet – until now.
Partnerships With Anti-Terrorism Organizations
Earlier, Twitter only ever banned profiles based on verifiable complaints made by users. Given the open and public nature of the social network, this was almost always fair. However, of late, Twitter has informed the media that they have deleted over 125,000 accounts because of the promotion of violence and terrorism.
In order to prevent the use of their platform to promote inhumane acts – as a number of their accounts were linked to the infamous Islamic State, Twitter has teamed up with organizations such as People Against Violent Extremism and the Institute For Strategic Dialogue in order to determine the sources of violence in their web and get rid of them.
The Main Hurdle
The key problem with curbing terrorism in social platform altogether is that in order to confirm the deletion of only those profiles that are proven to have promoted violence, the use of software or AI to sort out violent profiles is not appropriate. The media platform has to rely on taking care of each profile on a case-by-case basis which takes time and costs money. However, it is clear the Twitter is taking their case seriously, and we can hope less emanation of violence from their platform in future.