FLUSHED OUT
TWITTER SET TO PURGE NETWORK OF AN UNSPECIFIED NUMBER OF FAKE ACCOUNTS.
TORONTO • Twitter says it’s stepping up its fight against fake accounts, as part of an ongoing effort to counter abuse and misinformation on the social media platform.
On Wednesday, the company announced that they’re taking action on a class of sketchy accounts, and the scale of the purge is significant enough to warrant a warning to regular users that they might see their number of followers drop.
Twitter didn’t say how many accounts are involved. The only indication of the scale of the purge came from one sentence in the blog post, saying, “Most people will see a change of four followers or fewer; others with larger follower counts will experience a more significant drop.”
The accounts covered by Wednesday’s announcement have been dormant in a “locked” status as a result of some sort of suspicious activity, such as sudden changes in account activity, large numbers of unsolicited replies, or tweeting misleading links.
When an account is locked, Twitter reaches out to the account owner to validate the account and get them to change their password. If the account owner doesn’t respond, the account stays locked and can no longer be publicly viewed on the platform.
However, these dormant accounts still technically exist, so if they were following someone before their account was locked down, they still count towards the “followers” number. At least, that’s been the case up until this week.
Wednesday’s announcement comes on the heels of a Washington Post story reporting that Twitter deleted 70 million accounts in May and June, as part of more aggressive efforts to combat disinformation being distributed on the site.
Twitter’s stock price took a beating on Monday, falling as much as 9.8 per cent on the news before recovering, as investors reacted to the news.
In the case of the locked accounts, because they’re not active users, they don’t count toward the 336 million monthly active user base that Twitter reported in the first quarter of 2018.
As for the 70 million accounts referenced by the Washington Post, chief financial officer Ned Segal posted on Twitter Monday to say: “Most accounts we remove are not included in our reported metrics as they have not been active on the platform for 30 days or more, or we catch them at sign up and they are never counted. … If we removed 70M accounts from our reported metrics, you would hear directly from us. This article reflects us getting better at improving the health of the service.”
For the sake of comparison, earlier this year Facebook revealed that it deleted 583 million fake accounts in the first three months of this year, in most cases almost immediately after sign-up, as anti-fraud algorithms filtered out suspicious behaviour.
In the lead-up to the announcement, U.S. President Donald Trump had 53.4 million followers, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had 4.28 million followers. People will soon get an idea of how many of them were fake.