Yahoo! News carried this report of censorship: Twitter axes 235,000 more accounts in terror crackdown.
From the post:
Twitter on Thursday announced that it has cut off 235,000 more accounts for violating its policies regarding promotion of terrorism at the global one-to-many messaging service.
The latest account suspensions raised to 360,000 the total number of accounts sidelined since the middle of 2015 and was helping “drive meaningful results” in curbing the activity, according to the San Francisco-based company.
Twitter has been under pressure to balance protecting free speech at the service with not providing a stage for terrorist groups to spread violent messages and enlist people to their causes.
The latest account suspensions came since February, when Twitter announced that it had neutralized 125,000 accounts for violating rules against violent threats and promotion of terrorism.
“Since that announcement, the world has witnessed a further wave of deadly, abhorrent terror attacks across the globe,” Twitter said in a blog post.
…
When you read Twitter’s blog post, An update on our efforts to combat violent extremism, out of 235,000 accounts, how many are directly tied to a terrorist attack?
Would you guess:
235,000?
150,000?
100,000?
50,000?
25,000?
10,000?
5,000?
Twitter reports 0 accounts as being tied to terrorist attacks.
Odd considering that Twitter says:
Since that announcement, the world has witnessed a further wave of deadly, abhorrent terror attacks across the globe
“…wave of deadly, abhorrent terror attacks…” What wave?
From March of 2016 until July 31, the List of terrorist incidents, 2016 lists some 864 attacks.
A far cry from the almost 1/4 million silenced accounts.
Of course, “terrorism” depends on your definition, the Global Terrorism Database lists over 6,000 terrorist attacks for the time period March 2015 until July 31, 2015.
Even using 2015’s 6,000 attack figure, that’s a long way from 235,000 Twitter accounts.
If you think “…wave of deadly, abhorrent terror attacks…” is just marketing talk on the part of Twitter, the evidence is on your side.
Anyone who thinks they may be in danger of being silenced by Twitter should obtain regular archives of their tweets. Don’t allow your history to be stolen by Twitter.
I do have a question for anyone working on this issue:
Are there efforts to create a non-Twitter servers that make fair use of the Twitter API, so that archives of tweets and/or even new accounts, could continue silenced accounts? Say a Dark Web Not-Twitter Server?
I ask because Twitter continues to demonstrate that “free speech” is subject to its whim and caprice.
A robust and compatible alternative to Twitter, especially if archives can be loaded, would enable free speech for many diverse groups.