Twitter says terrorist content threat is constantly evolving

Twitter says it’s throwing technology and people at countering terror posts, but the threat is constantly evolving.

Twitter says it’s doing its best to keep terror-related posts away from users. Picture: AFP.

Twitter says it will continue to invest in its technology and people after the Australian government warned it may pass new laws that could see social media executives jailed if they fail to quickly remove “abhorrent violent material” from their platforms.

The threat came after Twitter and other tech companies failed to convince the Morrison government on Tuesday that they were acting appropriately to prevent the live streaming of a terrorist attack.

Representatives from Twitter, Facebook and Google attended a meeting with Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Attorney-General Christian Porter and Communications Minister Mitch Fifield in Brisbane.

The Christchurch shooting was live streamed on Facebook on March 15, and subsequently shared across other media platforms.

In a statement issued on Wednesday morning, a Twitter said it had “been aggressively responding to the evolving challenge of preventing exploitation of the internet by violent extremists and terrorist organisations” for many years.

“More than 90 per cent of terrorist content on our service is now removed pro-actively, using our own purpose-built, proprietary technology, and the majority of accounts are suspended before their first Tweet.

“As the Christchurch attack shows, our work will never be complete,” the statement said, describing terrorism as a “shared threat”.

“As we make it harder for violent extremists and terrorists to use our services, their behaviour changes and evolves,” Twitter’s statement said.

“It was clear that this was co-ordinated and planned to try and exploit our collective systems. To stay in front of this, we will continue to invest in our technology and people, and well as working with governments and industry to focus on learning, collaboration, and technical cooperation.”

Automation, including new tools created specifically as part of Twitter’s Christchurch response, had been used extensively by Twitter worldwide, the company said.

“Our goal has been to monitor keywords and hashtags, including non-English terms, and to streamline our proactive removal powers.”

Twitter’s 24 hour on-call team has been “working tirelessly to identify new hashtags or keywords associated with the violating videos, and adding them to our proactive monitoring technology,” a spokesman said.

Twitter had also been working to share information, including relevant data and third-party website URLs with its partners in the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.

“Given the rate of uploads across the internet, it has been a challenge but we will remain vigilant,” he said.