Twitter Inc says it has shut down more than 125,000 terrorism-related accounts since the middle of 2015, most of them linked to the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

Twitter has said it takes down accounts only when they are reported by other users, but the company said in a blog post on Friday it had increased the size of teams monitoring and responding to reports and had decreased its response time “significantly”.

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The US government has pressured technology companies to co-operate and help them identify terror-related accounts, though Silicon Valley has been wary of engaging with government officials.

When accounts are reported, Twitter said it looked at ones that were similar and used spam-fighting tools to identify other violent accounts, which it said had resulted in more suspensions.

Twitter updated its policies last month to explicitly ban “hateful conduct”.

“There is no ‘magic algorithm’ for identifying terrorist content on the internet,” Twitter said in its blog post.

It added that it tried to strike a balance between enforcing its rules on prohibited behaviours, the needs of law enforcement and the desire by users to share their views – “including views that some people may disagree with or find offensive”.