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Almost 400,000 Twitter accounts suspended for pro-terrorism content in 6 months

Of those suspensions, 74% consisted of accounts surfaced by internal, proprietary spam-fighting tools

© AP/Soeren Stache

MOSCOW, March 22. /TASS/. Twitter has suspended almost 400,000 accounts in the second half of 2016 in an effort to fight terrorism-related content, the microblogging platform said in its semiannual transparency report Tuesday.

"During the reporting period of July 1, 2016 through December 31, 2016, a total of 376,890 accounts were suspended for violations related to promotion of terrorism," the report reads.

Of those suspensions, 74% consisted of accounts surfaced by internal, proprietary spam-fighting tools, according to the report.

A total of 636,248 Twitter accounts were suspended in the period of August 1, 2015 through December 31, 2016.

The microblloging service also published its statistics on content removal requiests, obtained from authorities of various countries. With a total of 522 such requests, Russia was ranked third, after Turkey and France.

"We withheld 55 accounts and 89 individual Tweets in response to removal requests from the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom Information Technologies and Mass Communications (Roskomnadzor)," Twitter said.

The Russian watchdog’s requests included content reported for promoting suicide, content posted by the Ukrainian nationalist group known as Right Sector (outlawed in Russia), and accounts that were defined as promoting extremism.

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