Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers

Odd that they counted in the first place. Maybe this is part of a phased roll out to identify first (refine the models), then take punitive action?

The cynic in me says they counted in the first place because it helped everyone's ego (and wallet)

"Most of the time, according to Twitter, the locked accounts are not included in the monthly active user count it reports to investors each quarter, a critical Wall Street metric for social media companies. But the locked accounts were nevertheless allowed to inflate the follower counts of a large swath of users.

That choice helped propel a large market in fake followers. Dozens of websites openly sell followers and engagement on Twitter, as well as on YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. The Times revealed that one company, Devumi, sold over 200 million Twitter followers, drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over."

I'm curious if this is a real crack down or they are just trying to act like it.

All of the big social networks have tons of bot activity to the point that most likely the majority of their requests are from bots. If they actually stopped all bots activity it would tremendously hurt their user counts and thus their valuations.

There's really only one solution to Twitter's problem, and anything short of it is just nonsense placating. They have to open up profile verification to all applicants. It would fix the platform overnight. You could just immediately ignore anyone who's not verified, yet it would still be optional for those who don't care.

Interesting to see social media platforms finally starting to be (somewhat) more accountable to their users. Their motives are a dichotomy. On one hand, their revenue comes from advertisers, so they must be attractive in the "metrics," but by padding the metrics, they lose the users that those metrics are supposed to reflect. It seems that Twitter has finally reached an inflection point where having more engaged users is more important than just having "good numbers."

As social media matures, I'm sure we'll see where the advertiser-friendly vs user-friendly line is drawn. Reminiscent of the banner ad boom that initially made great revenue for the sites, but in the end netted negative for the sites because of the users it drove away.

Kudos to twitter on this. This is one of those moves that harms them in the eyes of short term investors, but is The Right Thing To Do.

I've always been astounded that nobody seems to notice that Facebook continually announces record users, record MAUs and then usually a week or two after their quarterly numbers announces that they have removing millions of fake accounts. Always after they've 'beaten' on those metrics.

Facebook these days, for me, is 90% dealing with fake friend requests from people that are either clones of real profiles, or just complete garbage. It's part of my dislike of their platform, but they're more afraid of bad metrics than genuinely delighting their customer base.

It becomes a negative feedback loop too. We used to spend significantly on Facebook for several businesses I'm involved in, but now that most clicks are garbage/fake, we don't.

I know twitter gets a bunch of hate for not doing more, but realistically they are actually leading the way. I'm impressed with how they're operating more and more.