Twitter delete more than a million spam accounts of its platform every day, according to company executives at a briefing held this Thursday. With this statement, the microblogging network seeks to shed more light on its efforts to reduce the number of bots and false profiles in order to satisfy the information demands of users. Elon Musk and thus bring the purchase agreement to fruition.
As reported Reutersthe company reiterated during the meeting that the spam accounts were well below 5% of users who are given advertising, a figure that has not changed in their public presentations since 2013. The data provided this week is double what was indicated by Parag Agrawal, CEO of Twitter, in mid-May to offer explanations regarding the platform’s methodology when counting spam.
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).
– Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
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So Agrawal pointed out that spam is not “tracks”, that is, human or non-human, but uses combinations of both account types, as well as automation strategies. Thus, he described that “they are sophisticated and hard to catch” and that the fight against spam is very dynamic, since those who execute it are constantly evolving with their tactics. He also commented that they have professionals who manually review and vet thousands of accounts random Twitter feeds and use a combination of public and private data to calculate and report to shareholders about the proportion of spam and bot accounts on the service.
Twitter has not confirmed if the metric presented on Thursday is an update of these numbers or if it is counting something different. As reported The Guardian, the one million figure will include accounts that are removed when they try to join the platform and are therefore never counted as daily users. However, updating the data has not prevented Elon Musk continues to express his mistrust.
