Twitter is getting rid of more fake and suspicious accounts more quickly than ever before in an effort to minimize the amount of disinformation it helps spread.
The rate of account suspensions, which Twitter confirmed to the Post, has more than doubled since October, when the company under congressional pressure revealed how Russia used fake accounts to manipulate 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.
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The extent of account suspensions, which has not previously been reported, is one of several recent moves by Twitter to limit the influence of people it says are abusing its platform ...
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Twitter’s growing campaign against bots and trolls is part of Silicon Valley’s efforts to more effectively combat disinformation than it did in 2016, when Russia used some of America’s most prominent technology platforms to deceive voters on a mass scale and exacerbate social and political tensions. Google, Facebook and several other companies also have redoubled efforts against coordinated manipulation campaigns by foreign governments and other unseen forces.
But Twitter’s increased suspensions also throw into question its estimate that fewer than 5 percent of its active users are fake or involved in spam, and that fewer than 8.5 percent use automation tools that characterize the accounts as bots ...
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“I wish Twitter had been more proactive, sooner,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I’m glad that – after months of focus on this issue – Twitter appears to be cracking down on the use of bots and other fake accounts, though there is still much work to do.”
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Several people familiar with internal deliberations at Twitter say the recent changes were driven by political pressure from Congress in the wake of revelations about manipulation by a Russian troll factory, which Twitter said controlled more than 3,000 Twitter accounts around the time of the 2016 presidential election. Another 50,258 automated accounts were connected to the Russian government, the company found.
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Twitter launched an internal task force to look into accounts run by the Russian troll factory, called the Internet Research Agency, and received data from Facebook and other sources, including a threat database known as QIntel, according to two people familiar with the company’s processes.
One major discovery was the relationship between the Russian accounts and Twitter’s longstanding spam problems, the people said. Many of the accounts used by Russian operatives, the company researchers found, were not actually created by the IRA. Instead, the IRA had purchased bots that already existed and were being sold on a black market ...
Full story: Twitter is sweeping out fake accounts like never before, putting user growth at risk (WaPo)