The number of tweets advocating violence has come down but concern remains as 200 Saudi accounts were still found to be using hashtags representing sympathizers of Daesh and Al-Qaeda militants.

The ‘Sakina’ campaign of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs has revealed this dangerous trends online messages supporting violence through Twitter.

Director of the campaign Abdulmunim Al-Mushawwah said the study came after an earlier campaign failed to change the agenda of extremists much. “We needed a study to reveal danger indexes and therefore direct organized Sakina campaign so that they can focus on the dangerous group,” he said.

He said the study was initially conducted following a random survey of 200 Twitter accounts and hashtags. The sample was then analyzed according to specific criteria to gauge the extent of the extremists’ agendas.

“The study concluded that an average of 90 harmful tweets were posted every minute, which is 129,000 per day. These tweets call for violence or encourage people to join terrorist organizations, or indulge in verbal abuse,” he said.

Al-Mushawwah said the study did not take into account messages and tweets posted by sympathizers and followers, and only focused on accounts and hashtags published from platforms that belong to terrorist organizations to reach an accurate measure of threat.

The study showed that the volume of harmful tweets decreased during the campaign as compared to before.

The study also cited the spreading awareness among people to fight extremism in all its forms, along with calls from Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman for people to eschew such behavior.

Another reason for the decrease is thought to be the manner in which authorities closed down thousands of accounts that called for violence, especially against western countries and the US.