Twitter Inc gathered a team ahead of the one-year anniversary of the storming of the US Capitol to prepare the social networking site to address any damaging information related with the event, according to the firm.
On Jan. 6, 2021, followers of Republican then-President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election result, social media sites including as Twitter and Facebook were accused of aiding extremists to organise the siege.
Twitter claimed it “convened a cross-functional working group” made up of personnel from its site integrity, trust, and safety teams to check for risks such as incitement to violence in tweets and accounts on the anniversary of the Capitol attack. The number of people on the monitoring team was not disclosed by the corporation.
The company said the endeavour builds on its work to monitor the platform during important global events, and it will continue to look for harmful information in trending topics and search results.
“We continue to actively monitor threats on our platform and will respond accordingly,” a spokeswoman for Meta Platforms Inc, formerly known as Facebook, said in a statement on Wednesday.
A YouTube spokesperson said on Wednesday that over the past year, the online video platform had removed tens of thousands of videos for violating its election-related policies in the United States, and that it continued to closely monitor for election misinformation on the site. YouTube is owned by Google.
In March, the CEOs of Twitter, Google, and Facebook testified before Congress, where they were asked if their platforms were to blame for the incident.
The only executive who replied “yes” was then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who added that the “broader ecosystem” had to be considered.
Days after the Capitol incident, Twitter stated that Trump’s account will be permanently suspended due to “the danger of further instigation of violence.”
“We have taken aggressive enforcement action against accounts and Tweets that encourage violence or have the potential to lead to offline harm both before and after January 6,” a Twitter spokeswoman said in a statement on Tuesday.
Thousands of accounts have been permanently suspended over the last year for breaking the firm’s prohibitions against coordinated detrimental activities, according to the corporation.
