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01/11/2019

1 In 2 Abusive Tweets Removed By Twitter Tech Tools In H1 Of 2019




1 In 2 Abusive Tweets Removed By Twitter Tech Tools In H1 Of 2019
Twitter has said recently that during the first half of the current year, the technology tools that are used by the company managed to remove one in two tweets that were found to contain abusive content and were posted on the platform. Twitter, Facebook and other such social media platforms have been under pressure from various quarters to be more proactive to prevent and remove abusive and false content on their respective platforms.
 
The pressure from lawmakers, regulators and the general public in the United States and other places has forced some of the Silicon Valley tech giants to pledge to impose stricter guidelines and policies for preventing abusive content on their platforms as well as to share more information on abusive content that are posted on their platforms in order to avoid stricter actions against then by regulators in the US, the European Union and other regions.
 
The company is currently probing into the possible use of proactive technology for bringing down the workload on people engaged for identifying and reporting abusive content to the company, Twitter said in its latest published transparency report.
 
“More than 50 percent of tweets we remove for abuse are now proactively surfaced using technology, rather than relying on reports to Twitter,” the company said. The figure in the same period a year ago was at 20 per cent.
 
This report was published by Twitter a day after the CEO of the company announced the decision of the company to put a ban on all forms of paid political advertisement on the platform starting next month. Lawmakers in the US and other places have also urged companies like Facebook and Google – the two largest players in the online political ad market, to take similar measures to filter and prevent fake content in political ads so that there is no spread of false information that could steer elections.

However in recent deposition before the US Congress, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that his company does not intend to conduct any scrutiny of the content of political ads arguing that it is not the job of his Facebook to fact check such ads as it would be against the principles of freedom of speech and expression.
 
The transparency report of Twitter also said that during the first six-month period of the current year, the company had made a 105 per cent increase in accounts that were either locked or suspended for violating its rules.
 
The report also said that during the period in question, the number of accounts reported for potential violation of Twitter’s hateful conduct policies had increased by 48 per cent while the company also suspended 115,861 accounts because those contained and posted terrorist content. This was 30 per cent lower than the number of such accounts that had to be suspended by Twitter in the same period a year ago.
 
About 67 per cent more legal requests for the removal of alleged malicious from 49 countries was received by the company in the first half of the current year while and about 80 per cent of those requests came from Japan, Russia and Turkey, the company said in the report.
 
(Source:www.japantimes.com)

Christopher J. Mitchell

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