FIVE THINGS ABOUT TWITTER’S BOT PURGE

1 WHAT HAPPENED?

Prominent conservative pundits and activists said Wednesday that thousands of their Twitter followers had been deleted overnight. Other users said they received messages from Twitter asking them to confirm they were real people before being allowed to keep using the service.

2 WHO WAS AFFECTED?

Twitter is shutting down automated accounts that pretend to be real people as pressure mounts to purge the service of “bots” that inflate follower counts. Researchers say as many as 15 per cent of accounts could be fake or spam, a number Twitter says is much lower. White nationalist Richard Spencer and conservative broadcaster Bill Mitchell both said they’d been affected.

3 WHY DID TWITTER DO THIS?

Twitter is escalating efforts to combat malicious bots. Twitter was designed to be friendly to innocuous bot accounts that can help companies quickly spread their message or respond to customer complaints. Yet bots can also be used to pose as other people or to spread misinformation. Some fake accounts have been traced to Russianbacked agents that the U.S. government says are working to sow political discord in the country.

4 HOW DID THEY PICK ACCOUNTS TO SUSPEND?

Twitter said that when it identifies an account that may violate its terms of service, it will ask the owner to confirm a phone number to verify that a human is behind it. When an account is locked and being challenged to provide a phone number, it’s removed from follower counts until it provides a phone number, Twitter added. “Twitter’s tools are apolitical and we enforce our rules without political bias,” the company said.

5 THE REACTION?

Some conservative users are accusing the company of unfairly targeting their followers. “The twitter purge is real,” conservative podcast host Dan Bongino said on Twitter. “Twitter blocked me from twitter ads last night and purged thousands of followers.”