Moral Panics: Twitter Feels Compelled To Tell You It's Deleted Over 125,000 Terrorist Twitter Accounts

from the what-good-has-that-really-done? dept

It seems we’ve entered the next big moral panic: the fact that terrorists like ISIS use social media. It’s a point of contention that keeps coming up, leading Presidential candidates to talk about stopping terrorists from using the internet. There was a whole big “summit” between White House officials and tech execs in which questions were raised about blocking ISIS from using social media. And, then, of course, you’ve even had some tech company execs support the idea.

And now, the inevitable followup on this is tech companies feeling the need to show just how “tough on terrorism” they are by highlighting how many people they’ve kicked off their service. Up first, Twitter. The company was just recently sued by a woman who lost her husband to an ISIS attack, in which she claims that Twitter is guilty of material support for terrorism, because it allowed ISIS to use Twitter to grow. And so now, Twitter feels the need to proudly highlight the removal of 125,000 terrorist accounts:

e condemn the use of Twitter to promote terrorism and the Twitter Rules make it clear that this type of behavior, or any violent threat, is not permitted on our service. As the nature of the terrorist threat has changed, so has our ongoing work in this area. Since the middle of 2015 alone, we?ve suspended over 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS.

Our efforts have not stopped there. We have increased the size of the teams that review reports, reducing our response time significantly. We also look into other accounts similar to those reported and leverage proprietary spam-fighting tools to surface other potentially violating accounts for review by our agents. We have already seen results, including an increase in account suspensions and this type of activity shifting off of Twitter.

Every company, of course, has the right to determine who can and who cannot use their service, but is this really the best response? Hell, just recently there was a situation in which an ISIS leader used Twitter and other social media platforms to try to urge more Muslims to join ISIS, and it turned into a ton of Muslims totally mocking ISIS.

When you start deleting accounts, you lose out on those kinds of interactions, which I would imagine are ridiculously more powerful than shutting down accounts of terrorists who will simply open up a new one hours later.

On top of that, merely deleting those Twitter accounts actually hides some information that can be used to track down ISIS members and see what they’re doing. Obviously no one wants to be seen “supporting” ISIS, but building a moral panic over the fact that they happen to use social media to spread idiotic ideas hardly seems helpful. If anything, it suggests that their messages are a lot more powerful than they really are. Shutting them down makes them think that what they’re saying is having an impact. Mocking them and laughing at them (or even ignoring them) shows that it’s having the opposite effect.

But, of course, for much of the media and many politicians, such nuance is not allowed. Instead the focus needs to be on shutting such accounts down. And that leads you to silly announcements like Twitter’s from last week.

Filed Under: counterspeech, deleting accounts, free speech, isis, material support, moral panic
Companies: twitter