Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
Source: NYT
By Nicholas Confessore and Gabriel J.X. Dance
July 11, 2018
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Twitter will begin removing tens of millions of suspicious accounts from users followers on Thursday, signaling a major new effort to restore trust on the popular but embattled platform.
The reform takes aim at a pervasive form of social media fraud. Many users have inflated their followers on Twitter or other services with automated or fake accounts, buying the appearance of social influence to bolster their political activism, business endeavors or entertainment careers.
Twitters decision will have an immediate impact: Beginning on Thursday, many users, including those who have bought fake followers and any others who are followed by suspicious accounts, will see their follower numbers fall. While Twitter declined to provide an exact number of affected users, the company said it would strip tens of millions of questionable accounts from users followers. The move would reduce the total combined follower count on Twitter by about 6 percent a substantial drop.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/technology/twitter-fake-followers.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
sandensea
(21,688 posts)Good for you, Twitter.
dweller
(23,682 posts)it leaves Hair Twitler with 6 followers ...
cp
(6,670 posts)Thank you.
rtracey
(2,062 posts)I am glad to hear it...they also need to figure out a way to check these things upon registering....perhaps more to the sign up process besides name and email
hlthe2b
(102,419 posts)FSogol
(45,555 posts)Some deplorables are already complaining:
FakeNoose
(32,823 posts)If somebody wants to be a "follower" they should be charged for it. If they don't pay, they're not a follower. I'm not talking about a lot of money, just something to keep the trolls out. Once Twitter has passed that hurdle, the quality of the threads will be immensely improved.
IMHO Just sayin'
Scoopster
(423 posts)Note that this is NOT banning or even suspending the accounts of the bots. This is merely hiding the fact that they exist. It does NOTHING at all to stop:
- Propaganda
- Falsified news reports
- Unconfirmed news reports
- Conspiracy theories
- Harassment, trolling & instigation
- Threats of violence & civil war
You can't fix the damn problem by hiding it under the damn rug.
Response to Cattledog (Original post)
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marble falls
(57,353 posts)Initech
(100,108 posts)TeamPooka
(24,264 posts)brooklynite
(94,792 posts)I have some lovely (and very polite) Russian bot followers.
LiberalArkie
(15,730 posts)constantly praise and worship our wonderful, kind and benevolent leader humungous the great.
catbyte
(34,485 posts)bot at least 6 times in the past 2 months. It's annoying as hell. I'm not sure what I'm doing to trigger the suspicion, but it is a pain in the neck.
Javaman
(62,534 posts)as he declares this "fake" fake news
elmac
(4,642 posts)and a bunch were obviously putin accounts, and were spreading anti NATO propaganda.
Bigredhunk
(1,351 posts)President Trump, who has used Twitter as a way to speak directly to both loyal voters and critics, lost about 340,000 followers in the Twitter purge, knocked down to 53 million from 53.4 millon on Wednesday. His predecessor, President Barack Obama, took a much bigger hit, losing three million followers in about one day. (He started with many more, dropping to 101 million on Thursday from 104 million the day before.)
I don't buy that it only had 340,000 fakes.
BlueIdaho
(13,582 posts)Why bother going to a social media site where you are served up on a silver platter to foreign propaganda operations hell bent on the destruction of our way of life?
I flushed my Twitter account years ago. If they can get their shit together I may re-evaluate. But seriously, why waste my eyes feeding the trolls?