The Twitter account of a YouTube staffer was hijacked through Flipboard during Tuesday's shooting at his company's headquarters.

Vadim Lavrusik, a product manager for YouTube, was one of the first people to tweet about the shooting, which injured three people. The suspected shooter, Nasim Aghdam, died from a self-inflicted wound, police said.

Shortly after Lavrusik's first tweet, two fraudulent tweets appeared on his account, one making fun of his name, and another claiming one of his friends was lost in the shooting. The latter tweet had a link from Lavrusik's Flipboard account that showed a picture of YouTube personality Keemstar.

The Twitter team, including CEO Jack Dorsey, worked to fix Lavrusik's account and restored it by Tuesday evening. But the hackers didn't take over Lavrusik's account through his Twitter page. It was hijacked through Flipboard, a news aggregator app with a magazine-like design.

Lavrusik's Twitter account was linked to his Flipboard account, and hackers used it to post the tweets, according to Christel van der Boom, a Flipboard spokeswoman.

"We had strong evidence that Mr. Lavrusik did not authorize the activity even though our information indicates that whoever did this used the password associated with the account to gain access," van der Boom said in an email.

She said that Flipboard has since removed the fraudulent posts and blocked access to "further unauthorized use of the account."

Third-party access is often an avenue that attackers use to take over Twitter accounts without actually getting your Twitter password. A massive Twitter hack in March 2017, which hijacked accounts from the European Parliament to Unicef to Sprint's CEO, took advantage of a vulnerable third-party app called Twitter Counter.

You can revoke access to third-party apps through your settings on Twitter. In a tweeted statement Tuesday, Twitter said it was "aware of attempts by some people to deceive others with misinformation around this tragedy."

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iHate: CNET looks at how intolerance is taking over the internet.</s>For our new cover story on Twitter, which charts the company’s struggles to rid its service of trolls, bots, and other assorted troublemakers, we spoke with more than 60 sources, including 44 former Twitter employees–most of whom requested anonymity–as well as third-party experts. During this process, we heard endless tales of internal dysfunction at Twitter, and plenty of criticism of the company for past mistakes and missed opportunities. But these sources also shared smart suggestions on ways Twitter can do more to protect its platform from abuse and toxicity. Many would be relatively straightforward to implement, requiring neither AI breakthroughs nor massive hiring sprees.

Social platforms pour immense resources into dealing with the consequences once someone has violated their user standards, which in the case of Twitter are known as the Twitter rules. Most users, of course, never bother to bone up on those mandates in the first place. Susan Benesch, whose Dangerous Speech Project is a member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, says she’s implored executives to raise the visibility of these policies, which outline what you can’t say on the service. “They say, ‘Nobody reads the rules,'” she recounts. “And I say ‘That’s right. And nobody reads the Constitution, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have civics classes and try to get people to read it.'” 2. Give Trust And Safety (Even) More Resources In a live Q&A on safety Twitter held last month, CEO Jack Dorsey said that general counsel Vijaya Gadde, whose reports include the trust and safety team, “feels she’s in a position to always have to ask for resources, and pull people along on certain changes we know we need to make, and that speaks to a lack of a collaboration, a lack of shared goals, a lack of shared prioritization.” This same complaint applies to Twitter’s approach for nearly every year of its existence. Indeed, there were continuous cries for more safety resources dating back to 2010, yet they were never heeded. This needs to change. The company’s trust and safety team (which reports to legal and oversees policy) and its user services team (which reports to engineering and is responsible for operationalizing these policies with enforcement) are too often at odds. Many sources bemoaned the friction between these two groups; as we report in our feature, they constantly fought over how to enforce certain policies and what content to allow on the platform. Simply put, some sources argue the trust and safety team moved too slow, coming across as idealistic about free speech and naïve about the realities of policing the service, whereas the user services team moved too fast, too focused on Whac-a-Mole and hitting quarterly goals while not paying enough attention to addressing underlying platform problems in a cohesive manner. 4. Redefine Twitter’s Belief In Free Speech For This Era Does the company still consider itself apart of the “free speech wing of the free speech party?” Dorsey’s actions would suggest that his views on this long-held corporate value have evolved. Yet Twitter hasn’t clarified what that ethos means today. How has it changed since Dorsey’s return in 2015, or when the company first began codifying these ideals–“let the tweets flow”–around 2011? One refrain from our reporting: Twitter has gotten better about developing policies to counter abuse on its platform, but it still lags behind services like YouTube in automating how these policies are enforced. A number of sources wished that Twitter would develop more internal tools to scale policy enforcement so it could rely less on users self-reporting abuse. In the long term, that would also let it rely less on human employees manually combing through this flagged content. One user services agent estimated that 75% of the work today was being done manually, while just 25% was being flagged by an algorithm or another automated system. This approach needs more balance between human and engineering solutions. There’s nothing inherently pernicious about using automation to push tweets to a Twitter account without human intervention; it’s how plenty of media outlets promote their content to readers, for example. But when bots pose as people–such as everyday Americans spouting sentiments crafted by professional trolls in other countries–they become a problem for Twitter and society. The company recently imposed new restrictions on automated tweeting designed to foil abuse, but it could go further by requiring that such tweets be clearly labeled as such. “Simple measures to apply some level of transparency to those sorts of activities would go a long way toward improving the user experience,” says Jonathon Morgan, founder of Data for Democracy. “Most people are duped into believing that the public is interested in some story or some idea when in fact that crowd has been manufactured.”

Twitter has frequently been accused to failing to deal with bots adequately because eliminating them would shrink its monthly active users, thereby hurting its ability to make money through advertising. Though the company already says that its flat user numbers are due in part to it cracking down on malicious accounts, it could change the conversation by declaring that it will henceforth subtract bots–which don’t pay attention to ads anyhow–from its stats. “It would be a statement to measure not users, but human users,” says Anna Westelius, director of security research at bot-fighting company Distil Networks. Much of the abuse on Twitter is not one-off instances of bad behavior but a form of digital stalking which only grows more dangerous as incidents pile up. The company should assess such cases in their entirety, which requires documenting them on a continuing basis. “Let’s say your address was doxed on Twitter and you have someone that was obsessed with you and kept tweeting out your public address and phone number,” says Brianna Wu, one of the principal targets of the 2014 online harassment campaign known as Gamergate. “As best as I can tell, Twitter doesn’t really keep notes in your Twitter account file to follow up on that well.” (Overall, however, Wu does praise Twitter for steps it’s taken to make life harder for trolls.) Right now, reports of abuse on Twitter enter a single queue of tickets, which the company’s user support agents manually go through to review flagged content. The company should recognize that some users and third-party organizations are more adept at submitting material that is actionable or helpful in refining policy. Twitter could determine which people or groups have a proven track record in safety reporting and allow their tickets to enter a second, accelerated queue, escalating them faster to support agents. YouTube has a variation of this system; it would be like a verification status for users specializing in platform safety, potentially creating Twitter’s equivalent of the neighborhood watch. Twitter trolls are not a unified army but a fragmented jumble of bad actors targeting different people for a variety of reasons, sometimes in ways that are hard to pick up unless you know what to look for. Experts on specific cultures–including folks who have been harassed on Twitter themselves–could help the company figure out how best to direct its safety efforts. “Twitter seems to ignore/antagonize its user base, sometimes, on some problems,” says Tablet Magazine senior writer Yair Rosenberg, whose Imposter Buster bot took on anti-Semitic trolls until Twitter banned it. “But it could very easily create channels of communication with different groups of users and different parts of the social media sphere, who could give them tips.” Amnesty International’s Azmina Dhrodia wants the company to implement enhanced systems for its users not only to track reports of hateful conduct and abuse, but also to more clearly understand the company’s responses to incidents. She hopes part of this system will include an option for users to rate their satisfaction with the company’s response to abuse reports as well as to share their feedback on the decision. This could help users feel more included in the process and perhaps additionally yield novel safety performance metrics. A number of sources felt that Twitter was far too reactionary and narrowly focused on protecting users within the confines of its own service. Yet many incidents of harassment get their start on other platforms, with trolls coordinating their targets and attack approach (hashtags, memes, etc.) on, say, public forums or Reddit first before pulling the trigger on Twitter. The company ought to do more to investigate this type of abuse planning, if only to give its safety teams a better sense of what offensives might be just around the corner.

Given that much of the misbehavior on social networks spans multiple platforms, it would also behoove Twitter to participate in an ongoing dialog with its rivals for consumers’ attention. That would allow all of these companies to share best practices in the war against trolls and bots–and given that it’s increasingly clear that Twitter is hardly alone in the difficulties it’s faced in dealing with this mess, everybody involved has strong incentive to be part of the conversation. Dorsey has said that the company wants to collaborate–rather than compete–on addressing safety issues in social media. While this is the right philosophy when it comes to developing new defenses against digital pollution, it’s likely the wrong approach when it comes to transparency regarding both Twitter’s current progress on safety and its past lapses in this area. It’s a bad strategy to follow the lead of other tech companies when it comes to openness with the public–Senator Mark Warner even went so far as to tell us that Twitter was “drafting” off Facebook on this front, which is alarming considering that Facebook has set a low bar for transparency. Let Silicon Valley collaborate on safety, but transparency ought to be another field of competition. As reported in our feature, Dorsey has been increasingly injecting himself into the process of who and what to allow on Twitter’s platform. While this more aggressive policing is a step in the right direction, some sources feel his direct involvement could lead to questions over how much his personal biases are playing into content decisions. Twitter has long struggled with this dilemma: Dick Costolo, Dorsey’s predecessor, ultimately made the call to permanently ban alt-right troll Chuck Johnson from the service, resulting in a lawsuit against the company earlier this year. The more Twitter can institutionalize a fair and transparent system for suspensions, the safer the company will be in the long term. Some sources involved in producing these annual reports have suggested that they have largely been inconsequential in years past. One source says they have been published “to pat themselves on the back. It was kind of useless information-like number of takedown requests from governments-which you couldn’t really dig down into for any wider context. It was like showing health stats for people with bad teeth or heart rates, but only showing that they’re all [consuming enough] Vitamin C. It just emphasized the wrong things.” Amnesty International technology researcher Azmina Dhrodia believes there could be major upside to Twitter opening up its metrics–even if they aren’t always pretty–so experts and academics can assist in developing possible solutions, while also holding Twitter accountable. In particular, Dhrodia wishes the company would at least become more transparent around data on response times to abuse reports. Twitter should delete tweets that engage in harassment and deception from users’ feeds. But instead of simply eradicating them, it should preserve them to share with researchers. It’s difficult, after all, to assess a problem and its solutions if you don’t have access to real-world examples.</s>Twitter Inc. on Thursday, April 5, said that it has suspended 1.21 million accounts between August 2015 and end of 2017 on grounds of "violations related to the promotion of terrorism". It also added that the number of such accounts was seeing a drop.

The social media said 2,74,460 of these accounts were suspended in late 2017 which was 8.4 per cent less from the previous reporting period and the second consecutive period in which Twitter witnessed a reduction in the number of accounts suspended owing to the same reason. The microblogging site said this in a blog post which covered its 12th biannual "transparency report".

It was also informed by Twitter that 74 per cent of the accounts covered in the latest period of reporting were suspended even before the posting the first tweet.

Twitter expressed a sense of satisfaction saying its hard work over the years in making the social media platform an unsuitable place "for those seeking to promote terrorism" paid off and now the tendency has gone down.

It also said that a majority of the accounts suspended in late 2017 "were flagged by internal, proprietary tools" and government's reports on such violations accounted for only 0.2 per cent of all suspensions.

Twitter began its 'cleanliness drive' in 2014 after facing criticism that it wasn't doing enough to stop people who were using it with sinister designs of promoting extremism.

In December 2015, after 14 people were massacred in a shooting at San Bernardino, California, the then US president Barack Obama approached Twitter and other tech companies with the plea to make it difficult for the terrorists to use technology to evade justice.

Twitter also faced the wrath of the kin of the victims of the 2015 attack in May last year along with Google and Facebook as they filed a federal lawsuit against the tech giants accusing them of purposefully backing the Islamic State terrorist outfit.

For breaking news & Instant updates throughout the day</s>Twitter has announced that it banned 274,460 accounts for promoting terrorism over the last six months of 2017.

 The number of bans reported in the twice yearly transparency report marks a 8.4% decrease on the six months previous as part of what Twitter celebrated as “the positive, significant impact of years of hard work”.

 As with its report last year, the majority of these accounts (93%) were automatically removed by the social media company’s internal tools, and 74% were suspended before their first tweet.

 “Government reports of violations related to the promotion of terrorism represent less than 0.2% of all suspensions in the most recent reporting period,” Twitter claimed – reflecting a 50% reduction in reports compared to the previous six months.

The bans follow immense pressure by governments across the world in response to terrorist attacks, with social media companies being accused of not working hard enough to prevent the spread of online extremism.

 Last year, Home Secretary Amber Rudd floated the idea that people who repeatedly viewed terrorist content online could be jailed for up to 15 years.

 In the face of this pressure, technology and social media companies have begun investing huge amounts of money to combat extremism.

 Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have announced funding for various projects as they seek to deflect regulatory interest.

 In the UK, the Government is introducing its ‘Internet Safety Strategy’ which could see social media companies pay an additional tax to pay for measures to address cyber bulling and extremism.</s>iStock/Thinkstock(SAN BRUNO, Calif.) — Multiple Twitter accounts appear to have been suspended or curtailed in the wake of Tuesday’s shooting at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California.

The actions come amid continued concerns over the online spread of false information that occurs on social media around shootings and other major news events, much of which involves the naming of false suspects.

On Tuesday, BuzzFeed reporter Jane Lytvynenko identified numerous tweets purporting to identify the assailant in the YouTube shooting, which left four people injured. Many of the tweets, Lytvynenko pointed out, resurfaced false claims from previous mass casualty incidents; one even misidentified the shooter as Lytvynenko herself.

An ABC News analysis shows 19 of the 34 disputed tweets Lytvynenko found have been deleted, while 11 of the accounts appear to have been suspended.

Law enforcement identified the suspect as 39-year-old Nasim Aghdam, who was found dead at the scene of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. On Wednesday, San Bruno officials said her motive was believed to be dissatisfaction over YouTube’s practices and policies.

Less than two hours after the shooting was first reported on Tuesday, Twitter tweeted that it was reacting to the spread of false information.

“We are also aware of attempts by some people to deceive others with misinformation around this tragedy,” Twitter said. “We are tracking this and are taking action on anything that violates our rules.”

Requiring tweet deletion “is the approach we take during situations where misnaming someone could put those individuals in harm’s way,” a Twitter spokesperson told ABC News.

“When we determine that a Tweet violated the Twitter Rules, we require the violator to delete it before they can Tweet again,” the company’s terms state. “We send an email notification to the violator identifying the Tweet(s) in violation and which policies have been violated. They will then need to go through the process of deleting the violating Tweet or appealing our review if they believe we made an error.”

Twitter cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey also responded, tweeting, “We’re tracking, learning, and taking action. We‘re working diligently on product solutions to help.”</s>Twitter said Thursday that it suspended 1.21 million accounts from its social media service between August 2015 and the end of 2017 for “violations related to the promotion of terrorism.”

Twitter also said the suspensions were on a downswing.

They included 274,460 suspended accounts in the second half of 2017, which were down 8.4 percent from the previous reporting period and the second consecutive period “in which we’ve seen a drop in the number of accounts being suspended for this reason,” Twitter said in a blog post covering its 12th biannual “transparency report.”

Twitter also said 74 percent of the accounts involved in the latest reporting period “were suspended before their first tweet.”

“We continue to see the positive, significant impact of years of hard work making our site an undesirable place for those seeking to promote terrorism, resulting in this type of activity increasingly shifting away from Twitter,” the company said.

Twitter said that 93 percent of the 274,460 accounts suspended in the last half of 2017 “were flagged by (the company’s) internal, proprietary tools” and that government reports of such violations accounted for only 0.2 percent of all suspensions.

Twitter began mass suspensions of such accounts in early 2014 as the San Francisco company responded to criticism that it wasn’t doing enough to crack down on users who promote or are linked to terrorist groups.

In December 2015, after the mass shooting in San Bernardino that left 14 dead, President Obama called on Twitter and other tech leaders to “make it harder for terrorists to use technology to escape from justice.”

Last year, relatives of the victims of the attack filed a federal lawsuit against Twitter, Google and Facebook, accusing the tech giants of knowingly supporting Islamic State and its extremist agenda.

The lawsuit contends the companies allowed Islamic State to build an outsize online presence and propagate its extremist beliefs and draw recruits, such as the couple who carried out the attack on the San Bernardino social services center.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Twitter reported 330 million average monthly users of its platform overall.</s>Twitter has put out its latest Transparency Report providing an update on how many terrorist accounts it has suspended on its platform — with a cumulative 1.2 million+ suspensions since August 2015.

During the reporting period of July 1, 2017 through December 31, 2017 — for this, Twitter’s 12th Transparency Report — the company says a total of 274,460 accounts were permanently suspended for violations related to the promotion of terrorism.

“This is down 8.4% from the volume shared in the previous reporting period and is the second consecutive reporting period in which we’ve seen a drop in the number of accounts being suspended for this reason,” it writes. “We continue to see the positive, significant impact of years of hard work making our site an undesirable place for those seeking to promote terrorism, resulting in this type of activity increasingly shifting away from Twitter.”

Six months ago the company claimed big wins in squashing terrorist activity on its platform — attributing drops in reports of pro-terrorism accounts then to the success of in-house tech tools in driving terrorist activity off its platform (and perhaps inevitably rerouting it towards alternative platforms — Telegram being chief among them, according to experts on online extremism).

At that time Twitter reported a total of 299,649 pro-terrorism accounts had been suspended — which it said was a 20 per cent drop on figures reported for July through December 2016.

So the size of the drops are also shrinking. Though it’s suggesting that’s because it’s winning the battle to discourage terrorists from trying in the first place.

For its latest reporting period, ending December 2017, Twitter says 93% of the accounts were flagged by its internal tech tools — with 74% of those also suspended before their first tweet, i.e. before they’d been able to spread any terrorist propaganda.

Which means that around a quarter of the pro-terrorist accounts did manage to get out at least one terror tweet.

This proportion is essentially unchanged since the last report period (when Twitter reported suspending 75% before their first tweet) — so whatever tools it’s using to automate terror account identification and blocking appear to be in a steady state, rather than gaining in ability to pre-filter terrorist content.

Twitter also specifies that government reports of violations related to the promotion of terrorism represent less than 0.2% of all suspensions in the most recent reporting period — or 597 to be exact.

As with its prior transparency report, a far larger number of Twitter accounts are being reported by governments for “abusive behavior” — which refers to long-standing problems on Twitter’s platform such as hate speech, racism, misogyny and trolling.

And in December a Twitter policy staffer was roasted by UK MPs during a select committee session after the company was again shown failing to remove violent, threatening and racist tweets — which committee staffers had reported months earlier in that case.

Twitter’s latest Transparency Report specifies that governments reported 6,254 Twitter accounts for abusive behavior — yet the company only actioned a quarter of these reports.

That’s still up on the prior reporting period, though, when it reported actioning a paltry 12% of these type of reports.

The issue of abuse and hate speech on online platforms generally has rocketed up the political agenda in recent years, especially in Europe — where Germany now has a tough new law to regulate takedowns.

Platforms’ content moderation policies certainly remain a bone of contention for governments and lawmakers.

Last month the European Commission set out a new rule of thumb for social media platforms — saying it wants them to take down illegal content within an hour of it being reported.

This is not legislation yet, but the threat of EU-wide laws being drafted to regulate content takedowns remains a discussion topic — to encourage platforms to improve performance voluntarily.

Where terrorist content specifically is concerned, the Commission has also been pushing for increased used by tech firms of what it calls “proactive measures”, including “automated detection”.

And in February the UK government also revealed it had commissioned a local AI firm to build an extremist content blocking tool — saying it could decide to force companies to use it.

So political pressure remains especially high on that front.

Returning to abusive content, Twitter’s report specifies that the majority of the tweets and accounts reported to it by governments which it did remove violated its rules in the following areas: impersonation (66%), harassment (16%), and hateful conduct (12%).

This is an interesting shift on the mix from the last reported period when Twitter said content was removed for: harassment (37%), hateful conduct (35%), and impersonation (13%).

It’s difficult to interpret exactly what that development might mean. One possibility is that impersonation could cover disinformation agents, such as Kremlin bots, which Twitter has being suspending in recent months as part of investigations into election interference — an issue that’s been shown to be a problem across social media, from Facebook to Tumblr.

Governments may also have become more focused on reporting accounts to Twitter that they believe are wrappers for foreign agents to spread false information to try to meddle with democratic processes.

In January, for example, the UK government announced it would be setting up a civil service unit to combat state-led disinformation campaigns.

And removing an account that’s been identified as a fake — with the help of government intelligence — is perhaps easier for Twitter than judging whether a particular piece of robust speech might have crossed the line into harassment or hate speech.

Judging the health of conversations on its platform is also something the company recently asked outsiders to help it with. So it doesn’t appear overly confident in making those kind of judgement calls.</s>Twitter has announced that it banned 274,460 accounts for promoting terrorism over the last six months of 2017.

The number of bans reported in the twice yearly transparency report marks a 8.4% decrease on the six months previous as part of what Twitter celebrated as "the positive, significant impact of years of hard work".

As with its report last year, the majority of these accounts (93%) were automatically removed by the social media company's internal tools, and 74% were suspended before their first tweet.

"Government reports of violations related to the promotion of terrorism represent less than 0.2% of all suspensions in the most recent reporting period," Twitter claimed - reflecting a 50% reduction in reports compared to the previous six months.

:: Are tech firms doing enough on terror?

The bans follow immense pressure by governments across the world in response to terrorist attacks, with social media companies being accused of not working hard enough to prevent the spread of online extremism.

Last year, Home Secretary Amber Rudd floated the idea that people who repeatedly viewed terrorist content online could be jailed for up to 15 years.

In the face of this pressure, technology and social media companies have begun investing huge amounts of money to combat extremism.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have announced funding for various projects as they seek to deflect regulatory interest.

In the UK, the Government is introducing its 'Internet Safety Strategy' which could see social media companies pay an additional tax to pay for measures to address cyber bulling and extremism.

In 2015, the then director of the FBI, James Comey, claimed Islamic State was using social media to "crowdsource terrorism" and said Twitter was used "to sell murder".

In Germany, a law which came into effect in 2018 is forcing social media companies to remove hate speech or receive serious regulatory action.

In response, Human Rights Watch warned that the law could "lead to unaccountable, overbroad censorship" and advocated for it to be reversed.

Politicians in the UK are considering whether a similar law should be implemented in Britain, although civil rights groups have warned against it.

Twitter noted these concerns, stating: "With the passage of new legislation and ongoing regulatory discussions taking place around the world about the future of public discourse online, we are seeing a potential chilling effect with regards to freedom of expression.

"According to Human Rights Watch, the wave of regulatory pressure in Europe and beyond is setting an emerging precedent and creating a 'domino effect' as 'governments around the world increasingly look to restrict online speech by forcing social media companies to act as their censors'.

"As regulators explore further potential restrictions, transparency is one of the most important ways we can continue to protect freedom of expression."

The social media company said it was proud of its "industry-leading policies regarding transparency about content restrictions" which included "uploading actioned requests to withhold content to Lumen" in order to prevent censorship taking place.

Lumen is "an independent database that collects and analyses removal requests for content online" and Twitter said it uploads most of its withheld content requests there unless it receives a court order prohibiting it from doing so.

In practice this means investigations into terrorist content and serious crime will not be publicised - but other forms of legal demands will be publicly recorded.</s>Twitter will be flapping into Flight, its second-ever mobile developer conference, on October 22.

The social media company is welcoming developers from all over to the San Francisco event with the promise of helping them "build the best mobile apps."

Not the smoothest move leading off with an egotistical mission statement like that.

The day's activities will include a keynote by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. As with most developer conferences, from Apple's WWDC to Facebook F8, we expect to see a smatering of new Twitter features emerge for users.

However, much of the conference will include "technical sessions," where developers will have dense discussions about programming in Java, Objective-C and Swift.

To prime the dev community for the October conference, Twitter has overhauled its developer site, making it easier for users to navigate and find answers. Twitter also noted there would be a lot more features coming to the developer site over the coming weeks.

What the heck are you doing Twitter?

In the last several months Twitter has been in a tumultuous period of change, changing the fundamental way its social network behaves.

In May, Twitter introduced a feature for users to mute an obnoxious tweeter without unfollowing them. Then the company decided to mess with social feeds yet again in August by promoting popular tweets favorited in users' feeds, even if they don't follow the tweeter.

And just last week, Twitter killed its third-party Twitpic image-hosting partner in favor of its own photo sharing service.

It seems high time that Twitter should hold an event of some sort where it can discuss its future plans at length rather than rolling out experiments and tweaks, which taken as a whole, have been universally annoying.
• Twitter or Facebook they're practically the same as MySpace</s>Twitter has now blocked more than 1 million terrorism accounts from its service.

The social network on Thursday published a blog post detailing the highlights from its 12th biannual Twitter Transparency Report, where it reveals information about accounts it’s removed, inquiries from governments, and data requests. In that post, Twitter revealed that it removed nearly 275,000 terrorist accounts between July 1, 2017 and December 31, 2017. While that was down 8.4% compared to the prior period, the company revealed that it has now banned more than 1.2 million terrorist accounts from its service since August 2015.

In the blog post, the company said that it’s been working for years at making Twitter “an undesirable place for those seeking to promote terrorism.” The company added that online terrorist-related activity is now “increasingly shifting away from Twitter.”

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Like other major tech companies, Twitter shares transparency reports to shed light on what kinds of content is on its network and why certain accounts were removed. In some cases, those accounts are suspended or data accessed because of legal orders or warrants. In others, accounts simply violate Twitter’s terms of service and are removed.

Terrorist organizations have long used social media and other popular services to spread propaganda and recruit new members into their organizations. And although Twitter was quick to celebrate its terrorist-related suspensions, the sheer number of removals in the last quarter, alone, suggest the service is still a sought-after spot for terrorists to land.

According to Twitter, 93% of the terrorist accounts were spotted by its own technologies and nearly three-quarters of accounts were banned before they could post their first tweet. Governments stepped in to alert Twitter to terrorist accounts in 0.2% of cases in the second half of 2017.
Twitter announces the suspension of 1.2 million terror-linked accounts since 2015.