Twitter to fight spams, trolls, hate speech

Twitter in a blog post said they are introducing new initiatives to fight spams, trolls and hate speech on its platform. The microblogging site disclosed that as on May 2018, it flagged more than 9.9 million potentially spammy or automated accounts per week, up from 6.4 million in December 2017, and 3.2 million in September.

“Inauthentic accounts, spam, and malicious automation disrupt everyone’s experience on Twitter, and we will never be done with our efforts to identify and prevent attempts to manipulate conversations on our platform,” Twitter India said in its blogpost.

Among other measures, the company is tightening their sign-up process where new accounts are required to confirm either an email address or a phone number. It is has also taken steps to audit existing accounts for signs of automated sign-up.


“The new protections we’ve developed as a result of this audit have already helped us prevent more than 50,000 spammy signups per day,” said the blogpost.

The company is also automating some processes where suspicious account activity, like exceptionally high-volume tweeting with the same hashtag, or using the same @handle without a reply from the account you’re mentioning, is flagged. The account owner has to complete a simple reCAPTCHA process or a password reset request to reclaim access to the account.

In the blog post, the company outlined new policies on hateful conduct and violent extremism, and is bringing in new technology and staff to fight spam and abuse.

Twitter has started updating account metrics in near-real time. This means, “the number of followers an account has, or the number of likes or Retweets a Tweet receives, will be correctly updated when we take action on accounts.”

In addition, Twitter can now put an account into a read-only state where the account can’t engage with others or Tweet.