Twitter Proactively Bans 43K+ Accounts For Violating Guidelines

Microblogging platform Twitter received 724 complaints in India via its local grievance mechanism between May 26, 2022, and June 25, 2022, of which it acted upon 122 content pieces. 

Proactively, Twitter banned 43,140 accounts for violating its guidelines related to terrorism promotion, child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity and other similar content.

Of these 43K+, 40,982 accounts had promoted content related to child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity, while 2,158 accounts promoted terrorism.

Of the 724 complaints, 536 complaints pertained to online harassment, while 134 grievances were for hateful conduct on the platform. Other complaints included policy areas including misinformation and manipulated media (21), sensitive adult content (8) and impersonation (13), among others.

Twitter processed 52 grievances which appealed to account suspensions and claims to have resolved the issues. “We overturned none of these account suspensions after reviewing the situations’ specifics. All accounts remain suspended. We also received two requests related to general questions about Twitter accounts during this reporting period,” the company said in the report published under the 2021 IT Rules.

The social media platform also stated that it removed all duplicate requests from the data provided in the report to count unique appeals.

As per its previous compliance report, Twitter received 1,589 complaints in India via its local grievance mechanism between April 26, 2022, and May 25, 2022, and proactively acted upon 46K+ accounts.

Twitter’s report comes at a time when the IT Rules are under amendments. The amendments will add another layer of grievance redressal to the existing status quo giving social media users to settle matters with grievance offices and then go to courts. The draft proposes that social media platforms have safeguards to prevent misuse of the grievance redressal mechanism, thus shifting the grievance onus on users.

Under the IT Rules, 2021 guidelines, other platforms that have published their reports include Meta (removed 22.8 Mn content pieces), Google (removed 111.5K URLs), WhatsApp (suspended 2.21 Mn accounts), and Sharechat (took down 2.6 Mn content pieces).