Twitter accelerates crack-down campaign on fake accounts

In March this year, digital platform Twiplomacy conducted a study on Twitter followers and found that Congress President Rahul Gandhi leads with the highest percentage of fake followers at a 69 per cent.

BJP President Amit Shah comes second with 67 per cent fake followers, followed by PM Narendra Modi with 61 per cent fake followers.

To address the problem of increasing spam accounts and trolls on its platform, Twitter has begun cracking down on spams and fake accounts. It has been continuously updating its policies to fight the menace.

Last month, the social networking site identified and challenged around 40 million fake accounts--up from 6.4 million in December and 3.2 million in September 2017.

The company said it will take further action to challenge a large number of suspected spam accounts globally.

The new crack-down policy takes away from various followers of our political leaders and celebrities who have amassed following from fake accounts.

To further ascertain the authenticity of an account, new Twitter handles will have to provide either an email address or phone number while signing up for the platform.

"Due to technology and process improvements during the past year, we are now removing 214 per cent more accounts for violating our spam policies on a year-on-year basis," Twitter said in a blog post.

The continuous effort made by the platform seems to be paying off with a drop in the average number of spam reports. In March this year, approximately spams were reported 25,000 per day which reduced to approximately 17,000 per day in May.

Twitter said that it has been betting big on technology and with the help of Machine Learning and other partnerships with third-parties it will improve its platform.

The social networking site has some 330 million users worldwide.

The development was first reported by IANS and sourced via TNM