Twitter’s Efforts to Suspend Fake Accounts Have Doubled

Bots, your days of tweeting the politically division nonsense might be over. The Washington Post reported on Friday that in the last few months Twitter has suspended accounts to stop the disinformation running on their platform.

Washington Post reports that Twitter has suspended as many as 70 million accounts between the May and June of this year, with no signs of slowing down in July. According to the data which is being obtained by the Post, the platform suspended over 13 million accounts during a weeklong spike of bot banning activity in the mid-May.

The sources tell the Post that the suspensions which occurs is due to the company’s efforts to comploy with scrutiny from the congressional investigation into Russian disinformation on the social platforms.

The report leaks that Twitter investigates bots and other type of fake accounts through an internal project which is known as the “Operation Megaphone” through which it buys the suspicious accounts and then investigates their connections.

Twitter has declined to provide the additional information about the Washington Post report, but pointed a blog post from the last week in which they have disclosed numbers of bot hunting efforts. In May 2018, Twitter has successfully identified over 9.9 million suspicious accounts. Which is triple in late 2017.

When the Twitter identifies an account that seems suspicious, it then “challenges” that account, by giving them a task such as to verify your phone number or other sort of information. When they are failed their account will be suspended and if the information is given correct the account would be reinstated.

Twitter noted in its very recent blog post, which says that bots can make the users look good by artificially inflating the followers count.

“As a result of these improvements, some people may notice their own account metrics change more regularly,” Twitter warned. Twitter also noted that cracking down accounts that are malicious actors which won’t be able to promote their content and accounts as easily as inflating their own numbers. Kicking the users off from their platform whether they are fake or not, they are risk for the company that regularly reports its monthly active users, though only a temporary one.