Between August 1, 2015 and December 31, 2017, Twitter has suspended 1,210,357 accounts from Twitter for violations related to the promotion of terrorism.
Of those 274,460 accounts were suspended in the last reporting period i.e. July 1, 2017 through December 31, 2017. This is down 8.4% from the volume shared in the previous reporting period and is the second consecutive reporting period in which Twitter has seen a drop in the number of accounts being suspended for this reason.
Of 274,460 accounts, 93% were flagged by internal, proprietary tools and 74% of those accounts were suspended before their first tweet. Government reports of violations related to the promotion of terrorism represent less than 0.2% of all suspensions in the most recent reporting period and reflect a 50% reduction in accounts reported compared to the previous reporting period.
In its last Transparency Report, Twitter introduced a breakdown of non-federal information requests from California at the county level. The company is now expanding this section to include counties from the other top non-federal requesters: Florida, Maryland, New York and Virginia.
With the passage of new legislation and ongoing regulatory discussions taking place around the world about the future of public discourse online, Twitter is seeing a potential chilling effect with regards to freedom of expression.
As regulators explore further potential restrictions, transparency is one of the most important ways Twitter can continue to protect freedom of expression. Twitter is proud of industry-leading policies regarding transparency about content restrictions. This includes practice of uploading actioned requests to withhold content to Lumen, an independent database that collects and analyzes removal requests for content online.
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