Social media site Twitter said it suspended over 10,000 accounts linked to Islamic State members and their supporters in the span of 24 hours for promoting violence online.
Last week, observers noticed that known accounts belonging to jihadists and jihadist-supporters vanished from the site suddenly. On Thursday, Twitter confirmed that it had purged the platform of the accounts for “tweeting violent threats.”
According to a report in the New York Times, experts believe Twitter accounts linked to IS could number in the 90,000.
The site has received “a large amount of reports” about jihadist accounts, according to a Twitter representative who chose to remain anonymous.
IS users regularly post pictures, some of them gruesome, issue violent threats to the West, and communicate with each other; some use their accounts to help recruit potential members.
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Terror experts believe IS has been the most successful terror group in using social media tools to disseminate its propaganda.
Twitter, however, is fighting an uphill battle, as many suspended users simply open a new account, sometimes under the same handle with an added number or letter, sometimes under a different one.
Twitter says it has some 280 million tweeting 500 million times a day.
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