Twitter Banned 42K Accounts For Posting Content Related To Child Sexual Exploitation, Terrorism

In accordance with the new IT Rules, microblogging site Twitter today released its compliance report for the period between December 26, 2021 and January 25, 2022

According to the disclosure, Twitter reported a total of 117 complaints during the same period. Most of the listed grievances pertained to online harassment (38), followed by impersonation (25), hateful conduct (20), sensitive adult content (17), defamation (11) and IP-related infringement (11), among others. 

Based on these 117 complaints, the social media platform took action against 455 URLs. These included 179 URLs for online harassment, 129 for IP-related infringement, 83 URLs for sensitive adult content, 21 for hateful conduct, 16 for defamation, among others.

In addition to this, Twitter also processed 81 grievances related to account suspension appeals. Based on these requests, 8 suspensions were revoked while the rest continue to remain suspended.

Twitter also cracked the whip on content pieces related to child sexual exploitation and promotion of terrorism on its platform. The social media giant claims to sweep everything from media and text to illustrations to highlight any such instances of illegal activities.

As part of this, the social media giant banned 37,466 accounts for posting content related to non-consensual nudity, child exploitation and related content.

Twitter also banned 4,709 accounts for tweeting content promoting terrorism.

Interestingly, the platform does not require complainants to be registered on the platform in order to file a grievance.

Oftentimes, a majority of these grievances are related to issues like verification and account access and, as a result, do not fall under the ambit of the grievance system. As such, the actual number, which is likely higher, is not reflected in these monthly reports.

Between November 26 and December 25, 2021, Twitter had reported a total of 97 complaints, mainly dealing with abuse and harassment (35), defamation (11), hateful conduct (12), and misinformation or synthetic/manipulated media (7). 

In its last compliance report, Twitter had also revealed that it had banned a total of 549 URLs, including 404 URLs for illegal activities, during November 26-December 25, 2021.

This comes barely hours after Meta also released its monthly transparency report for Facebook and Instagram. The social media giant said that the two platforms together took action against 12.2 Mn content pieces in January.

This is in keeping with the new IT Rules that mandate social media platforms to publish monthly transparency reports on data related to complaints received from platform’s users in India and subsequent actions taken.