The microblogging platform, Twitter has intensified its battle against fake and suspicious accounts with more than a million daily removal in recent months, which is the biggest move to curb the spread of disinformation.
Twitter was under pressure from the US lawmakers to fight the suspected spread of misinformation by Russian meddlers in the past elections, which is attributed to the infiltration of fake accounts, now it has sharply escalated its battle against fake and suspicious accounts on the platform.
The Washington Post on Friday reported that more than 70 million Twitter accounts were suspended in May and June, and that the company has continued to crack down on such accounts at the same rate into July.
While the removal of such massive number of accounts could potentially lead to a drop in the number of monthly active users on the platform, which Twitter had already acknowledged in its Q1 shareholder letter of a decline in its user base.
The company's decision to forcefully eject suspicious accounts followed the earlier implementation of new detection tools, including “Operation Megaphone” which involved the discreet buying off of fake accounts and seeking to detect the connected parties to it.
It uses virtual megaphones like fake accounts and automation that abusers of the platform use to suppress their voices, which operation is also known as white-hat technique, and serves as part of a broader plan to get the company to treat disinformation campaigns by governments differently to how it tackles more traditional problems such as spam.
The company, however maintains that there’s still a lot of work to be done to uproot spams and malicious automation which are disrupting everyone’s experience on the platform.
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