Twitter says it has suspended 235K accounts since February for promoting terrorism, bringing total to 360K since mid-2015
this is great, but... Not twitters only fatal flaw http://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter's counter-terrorism enforcement is accelerating fast: six months after announcing 125K terror-related suspensions since mid-2015, it says another 235K accounts were removed since February alone, tripling the cumulative total to 360K. The company is publishing these figures as a semiannual drumbeat, effectively turning enforcement volume into a public accountability metric.
The trajectory holds through the related coverage — 300K removals in the first half of 2017, with 75% suspended before their first tweet — en route to 1.2M cumulative suspensions reported in April 2018. The mix is shifting from reactive takedowns to proactive detection, which changes what 'moderation' means operationally.
First-order effects
- Terrorist propagandists using Twitter lose distribution at scale, and the burden of evasion rises as suspensions increasingly happen before an account posts anything.
- Advertisers and pressure campaigns targeting Twitter over extremist content get a quantified response they can cite, giving the company a defensible number in the reputational fight.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms face the same expectation of published enforcement tallies, making semiannual suspension reporting a de facto industry disclosure norm rather than a Twitter-specific gesture.
- Proactive suspension at this scale raises the stakes on false positives — a risk the corpus later confirms when [[a:973593|Twitter mistakenly suspended researchers and journalists after coordinated malicious reports]] and had to review the policy behind it.
Third-order effects
- Content moderation hardens into permanent infrastructure: dedicated detection tooling, published metrics, and pre-publication enforcement become baseline operating costs for any large social platform, not ad-hoc crisis responses.
- The same machinery built for terrorism sets the template for how platforms handle every subsequent enforcement category — and how their errors, not just their successes, become public events.
The trend: Platform content moderation is shifting from reactive takedown requests to proactive, metric-published enforcement, with each transparency report raising the bar for what counts as adequate action.