After receiving a lot of criticism for their lax efforts to pull down ‘bad user’ accounts or abusive users, Twitter finally launched a massive crackdown to make the platform safe and to protect their good user base. According to the latest report, the company has suspended over 70 million suspicious Twitter accounts in just the past two months (May and June).
This process has been accelerated, thanks to the use of artificial intelligence, since October 2016 when Twitter began to recognize how its platform was manipulated to influence the US presidential elections.
The report points out that the number of account suspensions in May and June have more than doubled in comparison to the company’s October accounts purge. That was also the time when the company had revealed that fake Russian bots may have meddled with the U.S Presidential elections.
Twitter follows Facebook
This move is virtually similar to what the other social media giant, Facebook did two months ago when it shut 583 million fake accounts that posted inappropriate content. Social media giants have now started to feel the immense pressure from users to stop the trolls and spam. However, this can’t be the last step to fight the abuse or malicious activities on the platforms and they will have to launch such gigantic crackdowns more frequently.
How bad does it really affect Twitter’s userbase?
With Twitter enforcing such stringent laws and cracking down on such a large number of malicious accounts, one could expect that the company could witness a decline in its user base.
However, according to the report, many of the suspended accounts had not tweeted in a while so it doesn’t affect its active user numbers. And ‘Active users’ is the most important metric investors look out for when Twitter ( or Twitter) disclose its reports. This is because investors can project the advertising revenue the social media platform can generate from the figures of ‘Active users’.Twitter currently has an active user base of 336 million users, which may not sound so exciting compared to Facebook’s over 1.5 billion userbase.
Furthermore, to help reduce malicious accounts and inappropriate content, the company recently launched an ‘Ads Transparency Center’ that allows anyone to see whose ads were run in the past seven days, along with ‘Fair Usage Guidelines’ that prescribe (to users) how to use the platform (appropriately).
We will have to wait and see if Twitter really turns up to be the safest platform for interactions on the Internet.
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