Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of Followers
Battling Fake Accounts, Twitter to Slash Millions of
Followers
Twitter plans to start removing questionable accounts
from users’ follower numbers on Thursday, reducing the total follower count on
the platform by about 6 percent.
By Nicholas Confessore and Gabriel J.X. Dance July 11,
2018
Twitter will begin removing tens of millions of
suspicious accounts from users’ followers on Thursday, signaling a major new
effort to restore trust on the popular but embattled platform.
The reform takes aim at a pervasive form of social media
fraud. Many users have inflated their followers on Twitter or other services
with automated or fake accounts, buying the appearance of social influence to
bolster their political activism, business endeavors or entertainment careers.
Twitter’s decision will have an immediate impact:
Beginning on Thursday, many users, including those who have bought fake
followers and any others who are followed by suspicious accounts, will see
their follower numbers fall. While Twitter declined to provide an exact number
of affected users, the company said it would strip tens of millions of
questionable accounts from users’ followers. The move would reduce the total
combined follower count on Twitter by about 6 percent — a substantial drop.
An investigation by The New York Times in January
demonstrated that just one small Florida company sold fake followers and other
social media engagement to hundreds of thousands of users around the world,
including politicians, models, actors and authors. The revelations prompted
investigations in at least two states and calls in Congress for intervention by
the Federal Trade Commission. In interviews this week, Twitter executives said
that The Times’s reporting pushed them to look more closely at steps the
company could take to clamp down on the market for fakes, which is fueled in
part by the growing political and commercial value of a widely followed Twitter
account.
Officials at Twitter acknowledged that easy access to
fake followers, and the company’s slowness in responding to the problem, had
devalued the influence accumulated by legitimate users, sowing suspicion around
those who quickly attained a broad following.
“We don’t want to incentivize the purchase of followers
and fake accounts to artificially inflate follower counts, because it’s not an
accurate measure of someone’s influence on the platform or influence in the
world,” said Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president for trust and safety. “We
think it’s a really important and meaningful metric, and we want people to have
confidence that these are engaged users that are following other accounts.”
The market for fakes was also hurting Twitter with
advertisers, which increasingly rely on social media “influencers” —
mini-celebrities who promote brands and products to their followers — to reach
customers. In recent months, advertising and marketing firms have put pressure
on Twitter, YouTube and other platforms to help ensure that influencers have
the reach they claim. Last month, the consumer goods giant Unilever, which
spends billions of dollars a year on advertising, announced that it would no
longer pay influencers who purchased followers and would prioritize spending
advertising dollars on platforms that took steps to stamp out fraud.
In an interview on Tuesday, Unilever’s chief marketing
officer, Keith Weed, praised Twitter for its decision. “People will believe
more and read more on Twitter if they know there is less bot activity and more
human activity,” Mr. Weed said. “I would encourage and ask others to follow.”
For Twitter, the reform comes at a critical moment.
Though it is a smaller company with far fewer users than Facebook or Google,
Twitter has been sharply criticized for allowing abuse and hate speech to
flourish on its platform. And along with other social networks, Twitter was a
critical tool for Russian influence during the 2016 election, when tens of
thousands of accounts were used to spread propaganda and disinformation. Those
troubles dampened Twitter’s prospects for acquisition by a bigger firm, and the
company, which went public in 2013, did not turn a profit until the final
quarter of last year.
In recent months, Twitter has taken a number of steps to
improve what Ms. Harvey and other company officials call “healthy conversation”
on the platform, including rooting out fake and automated accounts. Last month,
Twitter announced that as of May, its systems were “locking” almost 10 million
suspicious accounts per week, far more than last year, and removing more for
violating anti-spam policies.
Twitter locks an account — blocking it from posting or
interacting with other users — when the company suspects that it is automated
spam, or that it has been compromised, usually by having its password hacked or
leaked. Most spam accounts are quickly removed. But until now, even after
Twitter privately identified an account as suspicious and locked it, that account
would still be included among the legitimate followers of a user.
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.
Tens of thousands of automated accounts were created by
stealing profile information from real users, including minors. One such
victim, a teenager named Jessica Rychly, had her account information —
including her profile photo, biographical information and location — copied and
pasted onto a fake account that retweeted cryptocurrency advertisements and
graphic pornography.
Twitter officials believe that the new policy will
disrupt the marketplace for fake followers and curb abusive practices used to
create fake accounts: Since suspicious accounts will now be stripped from
users’ followers, the company hopes there will be less incentive to purchase
fakes in the first place.
Twitter has also begun to permanently remove more
suspicious accounts. After The Times’s investigation was published in January,
Twitter removed over a million accounts from the followers of Devumi customers
— accounts that the company said violated its spam policies.
The Washington Post reported last week that Twitter
suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June.
Twitter estimates that as a result of Thursday’s changes,
the average user will see his or her follower number drop by four — but that
number would be much higher for some accounts.
“As part of our renewed focus on public healthy
conversation, and certainly some of the information that The New York Times was
able to provide in their story, we felt it was an important step to take,” Ms.
Harvey said.
The Times needs your voice. We welcome your on-topic
commentary, criticism and expertise.
A version of this article appears in print on July 11,
2018, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Twitter Purges Its
Fake Followers To Restore the Power of Influence.
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