Islamic State's reach stalled on Twitter, thanks to crackdown

The Islamic State’s reach on Twitter has been reducing over recent months, says a report from the George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. According to the report, the extremist group’s English-language reach has been stalled, thanks to increased efforts against its digital proselytizers. They have often used Twitter to recruit and radicalise people, said the study. Further, the crackdown has also halted the viral reach of specific users, the report said. Easily discoverable English accounts that were sympathetic towards the Islamic State has usually under a thousand, and these users usually limited their activities to interacting with each other, found the report.

Twitter had earlier come under scrutiny for having a lax approach towards policing content on its network, especially since companies like Facebook had become much more active in this direction. The micro-blogging social network finally announced, recently, that it had taken down over 125,000 terrorism-related accounts on its platform since the middle of 2015. Most of these accounts were linked to the Islamic State. Twitter had also said that while it does take down accounts reported by other users, it has also increase the size of its teams that monitor and respond to these reports, hence decreasing its response time “significantly”