ISIL sees ‘diminishing returns’ on Twitter after crackdown

WASHINGTON // ISIL’s English-language reach on Twitter has stalled in recent months amid a stepped-up crackdown against the group’s army of digital proselytisers, who have long relied on the site to recruit and radicalise new adherents, according to a study being released on Thursday.

Suspensions of English-speaking users affiliated with ISIL from June to October 2015 have limited the group's growth and in some cases devastated the viral reach of specific users, according to the report from George Washington University's Program on Extremism, which analysed a list of accounts promoted by the militant group.

The report found that easily discoverable English accounts sympathetic to ISIL was usually under 1,000, and that those users’ activity was mostly insular, limited to interacting with each other. ISIL has seized control of wide swathes of Iraq and Syria and claimed credit for attacks in Paris in November that killed 130.

Twitter Inc has been criticised by government officials for its relatively lax approach to policing content, even as other Silicon Valley companies like Facebook Inc began to more actively police their platforms.

Under intensified pressure from the White House, presidential candidates and some civil society groups, Twitter announced earlier this month it had shut down more than 125,000 terrorism-related accounts since the middle of 2015, most of them linked to ISIL.

In a blog post, the company said that while it only takes down accounts reported by other users it had increased the size of teams monitoring and responding to reports and has decreased its response time “significantly”.

JM Berger, a co-author of the report, said Twitter is still less active than many of its rivals but that part of that is due to its relative youth as a company.

“Each company has been dragged into this kicking and screaming,” he said in an interview.

Reporting of Twitter accounts affiliated with ISIL is a steady, low-level activity generally, but occasionally events lead to “periodic purges,” Mr Berger said.

The study took place before the Paris attacks, which the researchers said likely led to a heavy wave of suspensions mostly in French and Arabic networks.

The average tweets per day measured across the lifetime of an account also declined during the monitored interval, from a peak of approximately 14.5 in June to a low of 5.5 by October, the report found. The average number of followers was measured between 300 and 400.

* Reuters