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Twitter is working hard to get rid of bot accounts

Twitter is working hard to get rid of bot accounts
Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney

  • Updated:

Ever since Elon Musk thought it would be more fun to buy Twitter than solve world hunger, he has constantly been trying to justify his decision by going on and on about Twitter’s bot account problem. Musk has threatened to pull his $44 billion offer for the social network if Twitter can’t prove that it is actively moving to solve the problem. With so much money on the table it is  not surprising that that is exactly what Twitter has done.

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Twitter has briefed reporters that it is removing approximately 1 million spam accounts from the network every day. The network has also reiterated its claims that bot accounts make up less than 5% of users.

Going through the processes of how they remove these accounts, Twitter said that human reviewers are manually examining thousands of Twitter accounts at random all the time. They use a combination of publicly available and private data to help them work out the number of bot accounts on the network, in relation to typical human accounts.

As to whether this will please Musk is anybody’s guess as nobody is really even sure if he actually wants to buy Twitter anymore. Also, Twitter says that it isn’t really possible for external companies to run audits on the number of bot accounts that exist on the app as it would mean private data would have to be shared.

Interestingly, Twitter’s new claims to be kicking off 1 million bot accounts a day is double what Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal claimed in May. Agrawal tweeted:

“We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).”

This would indicate that in the space of a couple of months there are either twice as many bots or Twitter has doubled its efforts. If it is the latter, it could indicate that appeasing Musk has become a priority for Twitter’s shareholders as they seek to profit from his inflated valuation.

Between Musk offering silly money for Twitter and Twitter’s shareholders prioritizing something that they themselves say is a fringe issue, it couldn’t be clearer that money really does make people do silly things.

If you are a big Twitter user you may want to keep an eye out for these new scams against and by Twitter verified accounts.

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney

Patrick Devaney is a news reporter for Softonic, keeping readers up to date on everything affecting their favorite apps and programs. His beat includes social media apps and sites like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat. Patrick also covers antivirus and security issues, web browsers, the full Google suite of apps and programs, and operating systems like Windows, iOS, and Android.

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