Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do.<p>I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then <i>usually</i> a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metrics.<p>Facebook these days, for me, is 90% dealing with fake friend requests from people that are either clones of real profiles, or just complete garbage. It's part of my dislike of their platform, but they're more afraid of bad metrics than genuinely delighting their customer base.<p>It becomes a negative feedback loop too. We used to spend significantly on Facebook for several businesses I'm involved in, but now that most clicks are garbage/fake, we don't.<p>I know twitter gets a bunch of hate for not doing more, but realistically they are actually leading the way. I'm impressed with how they're operating more and more.
Oh my absolute fuck. Every single Elon Musk tweet is followed up by an account with an identical image, and a one-character-off twitter account pretending to continue the conversation with a 'surprise'. It's always a link to some crypto BS. How in the hell Twitter can't auto-block that, particularly when the source account is a verified one, is behind my comprehension.
Odd that they counted in the first place. Maybe this is part of a phased roll out to identify first (refine the models), then take punitive action?<p>The cynic in me says they counted in the first place because it helped everyone's ego (and wallet)<p>"Most of the time, according to Twitter, the locked accounts are not included in the monthly active user count it reports to investors each quarter, a critical Wall Street metric for social media companies. But the locked accounts were nevertheless allowed to inflate the follower counts of a large swath of users.<p>That choice helped propel a large market in fake followers. Dozens of websites openly sell followers and engagement on Twitter, as well as on YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. The Times revealed that one company, Devumi, sold over 200 million Twitter followers, drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over."
There's really only one solution to Twitter's problem, and anything short of it is just nonsense placating. They have to open up profile verification to <i>all</i> applicants. It would fix the platform overnight. You could just immediately ignore anyone who's not verified, yet it would still be optional for those who don't care.
I'm curious if this is a real crack down or they are just trying to act like it.<p>All of the big social networks have tons of bot activity to the point that most likely the majority of their requests are from bots. If they actually stopped all bots activity it would tremendously hurt their user counts and thus their valuations.
As a person who buys ads on Twitter and Facebook, I really need them to step this up. It is killing customer acquisition costs when the majority of clicks come from fake accounts.
Interesting to see social media platforms finally starting to be (somewhat) more accountable to their users. Their motives are a dichotomy. On one hand, their revenue comes from advertisers, so they must be attractive in the "metrics," but by padding the metrics, they lose the users that those metrics are supposed to reflect. It seems that Twitter has finally reached an inflection point where having more engaged users is more important than just having "good numbers."<p>As social media matures, I'm sure we'll see where the advertiser-friendly vs user-friendly line is drawn. Reminiscent of the banner ad boom that initially made great revenue for the sites, but in the end netted negative for the sites because of the users it drove away.
These are not bots.<p>I've encountered many people complaining that Twitter thought they were a bot. Sometimes that was that, The End. Sometimes there was a demand for "real world" identification, like a phone number, which got refused because people like their privacy.<p>The common feature seems to be following or retweeting political users toward the right, and using hashtags associated with that. Do that exclusively, and twitter will assume you are a bot. The same does not seem to apply if you are on the other side of the political spectrum.<p>I think Twitter is well aware of this, and they consider it an intended result, but they can't just publicly admit it.
Good. If you follow any remotely popular people you'll run in to bots. You can see bots spamming replies to people even with just 80,000 followers --less than the million mark.
The reality is, that Twitter could have easily and simply fixed this issue long, long ago.<p>But, to do so they would have to place some power in the hands of the users. They don't want to do this because it means a loss of their control over what you see.<p>We already know that FB experimented with pushing people's mood and views on subjects around; Twitter is not immune to such temptation also.<p>Simply: assign 2 scores to every user, each out of say, 1000 (100 is not enough given Twitter's large userbase).<p>1 score is a category score, such as "lgbt politics" or even finer-grained than that, easily done by simply reading all of a user's tweets and using Bayesian (or some other classifier) auto-classification. This is a measure of how the user is perceived by others, inside that category.<p>The other score is a combination of per-region or per-country (because in general, people care about the people in their own country or region more), plus number of times a user gets a like or retweet in that same region, etc.<p>Then, simply let people filter based on those 2 scores. If I set score 1 at (cutoff everyone below 900) I will get top tweeters in each subject; if I set score 2 at (cutoff 200) I will let most tweets across the world reach me. etc. etc.
The comments here are overwhelmingly misunderstanding twitter‘s action: it will not lower their MAU numbers, where these accounts had already been excluded. Twitter is now just following up by also removing spam accounts from individual accounts‘ follower count.
if you've invested in twitter, join the class action fraud lawsuit where twitter knew about the 95mil+ fake accounts (conservative estimate), cause it's 101 obvious fake accounts that any idiot could spot, and still projected growth numbers including these accounts, and used those to help raise money. classic silicon valley fraud.
How can an account be fake? An account impersonating someone else? That's very different from an account that exists solely to boost follower counts. What's the problem with people paying to boost their follower count?
the amazing thing is, much of the comments in response to Donald Trump and other major figures are real. the bot problem probably has to do with fake followers, hahtag spamming, and keyword spam of sorts. Much of it is invisible to the naked eye.
Crazy that Twitter still sells ads and soooooo many of the accounts are bots. They have an obvious interest in inflating the total numbers.<p>It's a super, super simple problem. If they really cared, they'd eliminate bots entirely. Not that hard.