Twitter Says It Removes Over 1 Million Spam Accounts Each Day (reuters.com) 35
Twitter removes more than 1 million spam accounts each day, executives told reporters in a briefing on Thursday, providing new insight into efforts to reduce harmful automated bots as billionaire Elon Musk has demanded more details from the social media company. Reuters reports: The briefing comes after Musk threatened to halt a $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter unless the company showed proof that spam and bot accounts were fewer than 5% of users who see advertising on the social media service. Musk previously tweeted that one of his biggest priorities after acquiring Twitter is to "defeat the spam bots or die trying."
On a conference call, the company reiterated that spam accounts were well under 5% of users who are served advertising, a figure that has been unchanged in its public filings since 2013. Human reviewers manually examine thousands of Twitter accounts at random and use a combination of public and private data in order to calculate and report to shareholders the proportion of spam and bot accounts on the service, Twitter said. The company said it does not believe a calculation of such accounts could be performed externally because it would require private information, but declined to comment on the type of data it would provide to Musk.
On a conference call, the company reiterated that spam accounts were well under 5% of users who are served advertising, a figure that has been unchanged in its public filings since 2013. Human reviewers manually examine thousands of Twitter accounts at random and use a combination of public and private data in order to calculate and report to shareholders the proportion of spam and bot accounts on the service, Twitter said. The company said it does not believe a calculation of such accounts could be performed externally because it would require private information, but declined to comment on the type of data it would provide to Musk.
stop the flood (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say they're right - and delete 1 million accounts per day.
Why do they exist to begin with? Wouldn't it make more sense to stop the flood of new accounts, rather than try and fight them once they're in the system?
They're losing the fight against bots, clearly, and have no real desire to take proactive action.
They Have... sorta (Score:1)
Re: They Have... sorta (Score:2)
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Let's say they're right - and delete 1 million accounts per day.
Why do they exist to begin with? Wouldn't it make more sense to stop the flood of new accounts, rather than try and fight them once they're in the system?
They're losing the fight against bots, clearly, and have no real desire to take proactive action.
I think it makes sense.
You want to keep the sign-up process fairly simple to grow the user base, not to mention you have very little data on who a new user is. So filtering out the bots from new accounts is probably quite difficult.
But the moment the bot starts tweeting you now have data to start working with. And since there's only so many different Twitter bot toolkits out there any new bot is going to act a lot like all the other bots from that framework, making automated detection fairly straightforward
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Their sign up process is insecure and seems to be designed to favour getting new users on-board instead of keeping out spammers.
All you need to sign up is an email address. Anyone with a domain can generate an infinite number of those, and registering new domains is cheap. Most social networks require a working phone number which significantly raises the cost of creating fake accounts.
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But how many real accounts are created per day? (Score:3)
1.3 billion accounts, ~400 million monthly active users, ~200 million monetizeable daily active users.
1 million deleted per day is not a great rate considering the problem scope.
No wonder (Score:2)
Why Elon was concerned about bots.
Re:No wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Why Elon was concerned about bots.
He's concerned about bots because after an insane hot streak super inflated his ego he impulsively bought Twitter based on Tesla stock and crypto funding.
Now a recession is coming, Telsa stock has crashed, the bottom has fallen out of crypto, he's getting embroiled in various personal scandals, and so now he's desperately trying to get out of the deal using any pretext he can.
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Tesla is overpriced, it's market cap is more than all other manufacturers. So either Tesla has to become the only car manufacturer or the stock will drop
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And they added (Score:2)
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Add Jordan Peterson and Mark Rubin to that list. They both just got suspended for mis-gendering Elliot Page.
Peterson took it pretty badly. His unhinged rant on YouTube has become a meme, being edited into 90s era video games like Command and Conquer.
The real metric is total spam accounts (Score:3)
about credibility (Score:1)
sure they do (Score:2)
They routinely get rid of tons of pesky bots, like Jordan Peterson, and Dave Rubin for mentioning that Peterson got banned.
My body daily sheds a million dead skin cells (Score:2)
That's the average amount for most people anyway, and without context we can't gauge the significance of Twitter's bot elimination.
https://www.reference.com/scie... [reference.com]
Today (Score:2)
Maybe that's what they do today. What were they doing before Musk called them on it?
Twitter Bot Problem & Material Changes (Score:2)
It doesn't matter if you removed 1 million spam accounts per day if you are getting 1.3 million new spam accounts per day and don't know that. Also notice they never had any intention of letting Elon Musk look under their dress and prove to Elon Musk & investors that the 5% bot number is valid. Notice "The company said it does not believe a calculation of such accounts could be performed externally because it would require private information" in other words we refuse to reveal the due diligence asked f
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Notice adding a new policy of we will pay for your abortion and travel expenses to get an abortion, would again be a material change in company policy which is NOT allowed. Twitter is fucked.