(Reuters) – Officials with the nonprofit Simon Wiesenthal Center praised Twitter Inc yesterday for increasing efforts to thwart Islamic State’s use of its platform for recruitment and propaganda.
The center’s Digital Terrorism and Hate Project gave Twitter a grade of “B” in a report card of social networking companies’ efforts to fight online activity by militant groups such as IS.
“We think they are definitely heading in the right direction,” the project’s director, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, told Reuters in a telephone interview ahead of yesterday’s release of the report card at a press conference in New York.
He said the review was based on steps that Twitter has already taken and information that center staff learned in face-to-face meetings with company representatives.
Islamic State has long relied on Twitter to recruit and radicalize new adherents. The Wiesenthal Center, an international Jewish human rights organization, has been one of toughest critics of Twitter’s strategy for combating those efforts.
Some vocal Twitter critics have tempered their views since December, when the site revised its community policing policies, clearly stating that it banned “hateful conduct” that promotes violence against specific groups and would delete offending accounts.
