Twitter suspends more than one million accounts everyday, on an average, due to suspicious activities. Twitter has suspended more than 70 million users between May and June, to purge its platform of bots, trolls, and malicious foreign actors.
The massive purge has continued into July, according to the Washington Post. The suspension rate is nearly double what the company was doing as recently as October 2017.
This comes on the back of criticisms against Twitter and other social media platforms like Facebook for allowing propaganda and bots to flood the feed. Most of the social media companies have been trying to rectify the gaps and loopholes by imposing new rules for political advertisers and eliminating bots and abusers from the platforms.
Earlier this year, Twitter conducted a mass purge, which eliminated bots following popular and conservative figures. Twitter also started banning users for hate speech late last year.
As of May of this year, Twitter’s automated systems were identifying and challenging about 10 million accounts per month that were believed to be spammers or automated posters, a company spokesperson told Gizmodo. The company also said it is blocking more than 50,000 potential spam accounts per day from even being created.
Earlier this year, Twitter told Congress, just five percent of its active users were fake or spam accounts and less than 8.5 percent automation tools or bots, some of which served legitimate purposes.
However, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence estimates bots make up between nine and 15 percent of Twitter’s userbase.
In its shareholder letter, published in April, the company warned its active user figures “may continue to be negatively impacted in future periods due to our ongoing information quality efforts.
Twitter is also changing how the it views speech on its platform. While the company once called itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” a sopkesperson told the Washington Post it is now in the business of “balancing free expression versus the potential for free expression to chill someone else’s speech.”
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