Other select takeaways:
Terrorism/violent extremism
The Twitter Rules prohibit the promotion of terrorism and violent extremism. We suspended 44,974 unique accounts for violations of the policy during this reporting period. Of those accounts, 93% were proactively identified and actioned. Our current methods of surfacing potentially violating content for review include leveraging the shared industry hash database supported by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT).
Child sexual exploitation
We do not tolerate child sexual exploitation on Twitter. When we are made aware of child sexual exploitation media, including links to images of or content promoting child exploitation, the material will be removed from the site without further notice and reported to The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children ("NCMEC"). People can report content that appears to violate the Twitter Rules regarding Child Sexual Exploitation via our web form.
We suspended 453,754 unique accounts during this reporting period for violating Twitter policies prohibiting child sexual exploitation with 89% of them identified proactively by employing internal proprietary tools and industry hash sharing initiatives. These tools and initiatives support our efforts in surfacing potentially violative content for further review and, if appropriate, removal.
Abuse/Harassment
Under our Abusive Behaviour policy, we prohibit content that harasses or intimidates, or is otherwise intended to shame or degrade others. We took action on 1,043,525 pieces of content during the reporting period. We also updated our policy and removed the targeting requirement for content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occurred, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.
Violence
Our policies prohibit sharing of content that threatens violence against an individual or a group of people. We also prohibit the glorification of violence. We saw a significant increase in the number of content removed for violence and 66,445 accounts suspended due to initiatives launched to bolster operational capacity.
Hateful conduct
We made some changes to our Hateful Conduct policy during the first half of 2021. The policy was updated in January 2021 to expand our enforcement approach towards content that incites others to discriminate by denying support to the economic enterprise of an individual or group because of their perceived membership in a protected category. In addition to the policy update, we also removed the targeting requirement for content aimed at individuals or groups that references forms of violence or violent events where a protected category was the primary target or victims and where the intent is to harass.
Promoting suicide or self-harm
We prohibit content that promotes, or otherwise encourages, suicide or self-harm. During this reporting period there was a significant increase in the volume of accounts actioned (83%), accounts suspended (101%), and content removed (82%). Initiatives were launched to better detect and take action on content that violated our policy on suicide and self-harm which led to the spike in enforcment numbers.
Sensitive media, including graphic violence and adult content
We saw the largest increase in the number of accounts actioned and content removed during this reporting period. Initiatives were launched to bolster operational capacity that resulted in an increase in actioning of content that violates our sensitive media policies.
Illegal or certain regulated goods or services
Since the launch of the policy in 2019, and more specifically at the end of the last year, we have continued to refine our enforcement guidelines. This improvement resulted in more accounts being actioned for violation of the policy which in turn triggered an increase in the number of accounts trying to circumvent their previous suspension or enforcement action, thus violating Twitter policy on ban evasion.
