Twitter Is Shutting Down a Million Fake Accounts Per Day

Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin, reporting for The Washington Post:

Twitter has sharply escalated its battle against fake and suspicious accounts, suspending more than 1 million a day in recent months, a major shift to lessen the flow of disinformation on the platform, according to data obtained by The Washington Post.

The rate of account suspensions, which Twitter confirmed to The Post, has more than doubled since October, when the company revealed under congressional pressure how Russia used fake accounts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, and the pace has continued in July, according to the data.

I understand that “monthly active users” count has been a major metric that investors have used to value Twitter. But it’s a failure of Twitter’s executive team that they allowed the company to be painted into a corner where the company benefitted by looking the other way at large scale fraud because of an inflated “user” count.

Twitter’s executives should’ve started hammering home the point years ago that monthly active users is a legitimate metric, but monthly active accounts is not, and that in fact fake accounts are detrimental to the health of Twitter’s social network. Better late than never, but this should’ve started years ago.

★ Saturday, 7 July 2018