Twitter released their tenth “Transparency Report” on Tuesday. Hard to believe the website has been around for over ten years now. As part of the report Twitter shared information on their reporting and suspension process.

They’ve added a new program to allow journalists and others in the media to report accounts, and they’ve suspended over 600,000 twitter accounts since 2015 for “extremism”.

During the reporting period of July 1, 2016 through December 31, 2016, a total of 376,890 accounts were suspended for violations related to promotion of terrorism. Of those suspensions, 74% consisted of accounts surfaced by internal, proprietary spam-fighting tools. The Government TOS requests included in the table above represent less than 2% of all suspensions in the reported time period.

To expand on our past blog posts (from February 5, 2016 and August 18, 2016), we have suspended a total of 636,248 accounts in the period of August 1, 2015 through December 31, 2016. We plan to share future updates on our efforts to combat violent extremism by including them in this new section of our transparency report.

Incredible to think there are over half a million users that have expressed support for terrorism. We know that social media has become a breeding ground for extremism though.

Overall it’s a fascinating look at the way Twitter information is gathered and shared. It also offers the opportunity to look at some of the many reasons, accounts may be shut down including trademark infringement. The report is broken down into the different areas that data is requested, and distributed. Valuable insight into the social media site that drives the media narrative.