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Called to Fight
Mukhtar M. Ibrahim

Twitter halts thousands of accounts it says promote terrorism

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Twitter has suspended more than 125,000 accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist activities, "primarily related to ISIS," the company announced Friday.

Twitter also detailed work since mid-2015 with governments around the world, non-governmental organizations and law enforcement agencies to counter extremist content online.

The company said it increased the size of teams that review reports of terrorist activity on its social media platform, which reduced response time to those reports.

"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," Twitter said in a blog post. "We have already seen results, including an increase in account suspensions and this type of activity shifting off of Twitter."

In recent years since the rise of ISIS, Twitter faced increasing pressure from Western governments to crack down on ISIS propaganda. Twitter said "there is no 'magic algorithm' for identifying terrorist content on the internet, so global online platforms are forced to make challenging judgment calls based on very limited information and guidance."

Since the arrests of some Minnesotans over allegations of joining ISIS, federal authorities in Minnesota have monitored Twitter for clues to terror recruiting. In charging documents, prosecutors cited the Twitter traffic of alleged ISIS recruits and provided snippets of private conversations between the suspects and fighters with extremists groups. In criminal complaints against the men suspected of trying to join ISIS, federal authorities have repeatedly mentioned the names of two Minnesota men who they say inspired others locally to travel overseas.

Authorities said Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan and Abdi Nur have become online recruiters for terrorist groups through social media.

According to direct messages Twitter provided to investigators, Khaalid Adam Abdulkadir, arrested in December for allegedly threatening FBI agents, asked Hassan who goes by the name Mujahid Miski for advice on how to get to Syria.

And when the FBI arrested six men on the same day in April last year, U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger said they got help from Abdi Nur of Minneapolis who's believed to be fighting with ISIS. When he made it to Syria, authorities said Nur offered online ideas and encouragement to his buddies in Minnesota to convince them to join.