ISIS Twitter Traffic Drops 45 Percent In Two Years

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Twitter is one of the key platforms to help the U.S. in its fight against ISIS on the digital battlefield. According to figures made available by the U.S. government, over the last two years, Twitter traffic for ISIS has gone down 45%.

Declining online presence of ISIS

A lot of hard work and effort are needed to quiet ISIS on social platforms. Among all the efforts, two prominent ones are messages designed to mix up ISIS propaganda and new help from Twitter to counter terrorism-promoting content.

For ISIS, Twitter is the easiest way to connect to as many people as possible. Government efforts to counter ISIS messaging on Twitter could be driving all the ISIS supporters to other social networks, but the reach of other networks in comparison to Twitter is too uncertain.

Michael Lumpkin, director of the Global Engagement Center, told the Associated Press in an interview, “We are denying ISIL the ability to operate uncontested online and we are seeing their social media presence declining.”

Anti-ISIL audiences are increasingly vocal on social media, and this weakens the terrorist group’s ability to recruit, a key aim of our messaging efforts, said Lumpkin

How the U.S. and Twitter are fighting ISIS

The government’s endeavors against ISIS on Twitter were obstructed by a few difficulties initially. For example, anti-ISIS messages and other content the government was conveying were mostly in English and not Arabic. Now there has been a change in the broadcasting and publicizing of these kinds of messages in terms of languages and techniques.

Instead of directly propagating the messages in English, the government associates with other Muslim governments, schools, and advocacy groups and recognized community and religious leaders to counter and send out anti-ISIS messaging, mostly in Arabic.

Also there’s a considerable amount of anti-ISIS content. Anti-ISIS content dwarfs pro-ISIS content on Twitter by a proportion of around six to one, indicates the Associated Press. Now new Twitter accounts supporting ISIS have around 300 devotees by and large, while only two years ago, this figure was around 1,500.

Twitter too has helped directly in the digital war against ISIS by banning more than 1.25 million accounts on a charge of promoting terrorism, the micro-blogging firm announced in February.

“Our efforts have not stopped there. We have increased the size of the teams that review reports, reducing our response time significantly. We also look into other accounts similar to those reported and leverage proprietary spam-fighting tools to surface other potentially violating accounts for review by our agents,” Twitter said.

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