Twitter suspends almost one million accounts for promoting terrorism in two years

Almost one million Twitter accounts have been suspended by Twitter for promoting terrorism since two years ago when it first announced efforts to combat extremism on its platform.

The microblogging site said it suspended about 935,897 accounts for violating its rules on the promotion of terrorism from the start of August 2015 to the end of June this year.

In the first half of 2017, the company suspended about 300,000 accounts found to promote terrorism, according to the report.

About 95% of those accounts were surfaced for review by "internal, spam-fighting tools" -- up from 74% in the six months prior.

From January to June 299,649 accounts were suspended over terror-related violations - a 20% decrease compared with the previous six months.

According to Twitter's data, government reports pertaining to terrorist promotion accounted for less than 1% of account suspensions.

And for the first time, Twitter broke down the data from government reports that violate terms of service into three other categories: abusive behavior, copyright and trademark issues. The vast majority of government-related reports were related to abusive behavior (6,299), but Twitter took action on just 12% of them.

The transparency report, released on Tuesday, is the second from Twitter in its efforts to combat violent extremism.

Twitter releases the reports twice a year.