Twitter to slash millions of accounts
Twitter will begin removing tens of millions of suspicious accounts from users’ followers Thursday, signaling a major new effort to restore trust on the popular but embattled platform.
The reform takes aim at a pervasive form of social media fraud. Many users have inflated their followers on Twitter or other services with automated or fake accounts, buying the appearance of social influence to bolster their political activism, business endeavors or entertainment careers.
Twitter’s decision will have an immediate impact: Beginning Thursday, many users, including those who have bought fake followers and any others who are followed by suspicious accounts, will see their follower numbers fall. While Twitter declined to provide an exact number of affected users, the company said it would strip tens of millions of questionable accounts from users’ followers.
An investigation by the New York Times in January demonstrated that just one small Florida company sold fake followers and other social media engagement to hundreds of thousands of users around the world. The revelations prompted investigations in at least two states and calls in Congress for intervention by the Federal Trade Commission.
“We don’t want to incentivize the purchase of followers and fake accounts to artificially inflate follower counts, because it’s not an accurate measure of someone’s influence on the platform or influence in the world,” said Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president for trust and safety. “We think it’s a really important and meaningful metric, and we want people to have confidence that these are engaged users that are following other accounts.”
The market for fakes was also hurting Twitter with advertisers, which increasingly rely on social media “influencers” to reach customers.
Though it is a smaller company with far fewer users than Facebook or Google, Twitter has been sharply criticized for allowing abuse and hate speech to flourish on its platform. And along with other social networks, Twitter was a critical tool for Russian influence during the 2016 election, when tens of thousands of accounts were used to spread propaganda and disinformation.