Twitter is doing its best to attract as many users as it possibly can, but not everyone who signs up for an account is welcome on the platform. In its latest transparency report, which covers activity on Twitter between July and December of last year, the social network revealed its latest tally of banned accounts has risen dramatically. The company’s statistics show that it had to ban over 375,000 accounts for spouting hateful rhetoric in the last half of 2016 alone, bringing the total number of accounts banned for such behavior to over 630,000.
Twitter doesn’t unpack the specifics of the banned accounts or offer much in the way of an explanation as to what type of content the banned profiles were attempting to promote, but if you’ve been a Twitter user for any reasonable amount of time it’s safe to say you have an idea of how extreme some users can be.
In addition to providing banned account stats, Twitter also updated its transparency report with the number of new government information requests it received during that same time frame. The company’s figures show it took a total of 2,304 account information requests from the United States government, which is down slightly from the six month period that preceded it. The company complied with approximately 82% of those requests and provided “some information.” Twitter also fielded 412 “Emergency Disclosure Requests” — which are disclosure requests related to threats of terrorism or self-harm — from US government bodies and provided information in 80% of those cases as well.
