Twitter doesn’t seem to be slowing down its fight against fake users as the company reportedly suspended 70 million accounts in May and June in its attempts to reduce the impact of misinformation. This new count is double the accounts it suspended back in October.
The company back in February assured that it is and will be wiping out bots, not silencing conservatives. It is also taking advantage of the opportunity to restrict retweet-spamming accounts and promote more genuine interaction. Today’s announcement comes as a move to control misinformation, and also acts as a definite policy shift for the company.
Either way, suspending 70 million users in one go is still a huge deal for the company who is struggling to increase user count. However, according to Twitter’s VP of Trust and Safety, the company didn’t have a huge effect on banning the accounts as those accounts weren’t tweeting regularly. Twitter declined to comment as expected. The company for suspending the accounts started looking at accounts behavior to identify them, determine things like tweeting from a large number of unfamiliar accounts, and how often they were blocked.
Twitter’s Vice President for Trust and Safety Del Harvey said that the company is planning to go further in the year ahead. she said: “We have to keep observing what the newest vectors are, and changing our ways to counter those. This doesn’t mean we’re going to sit on our laurels.”