Twitter Escalates Purge Against Fake Social Media Followers
Posted on | July 12, 2018 | No Comments
Twitter has begun implementing bold steps to secure and increase its overall legitimate global user count and to also stem the tide of fake profiles. The New York Times recently reported that Twitter has begun to purge tens of millions suspicious accounts from users’ followers which could result in a minimal to a very significant follower drop globally. Be sure to check your Twitter account to see how the new purge filters your follower count.
A recent blog post from Twitter HQ – How Twitter is fighting spam and malicious automation – provided the following jaw-dropping stats on the growth of and battle against fake Twitter accounts:
“In May 2018, our systems identified and challenged more than 9.9 million potentially spammy or automated accounts per week. That’s up from 6.4 million in December 2017, and 3.2 million in September.”
The New York Times reported that Twitter is aiming at a reduction of a total combined follower count by about 6 percent.
Del Harvey, Twitter’s vice president for trust and safety had the following to say about the ongoing battle of fake Twitter followers:
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.
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.
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.
Read the rest of the New York Times article here.
To learn more about Twitter within the digital marketing realm check out these Emarketing blog posts:
- The Emarketing Blog Revisits the Social Media and Hashtag Kinship
- Fishing Tactics for the Twittersphere
- They’ve Done It! Twitter Increases Messaging from 140 to 280 Characters Providing So Much More Room!
- Twitter – A Decade of Social Media Success
- Are Twitter Hashtags Polluting The Social Media Digital Beach?
- Show some Tweet, Tweet Love on Social Media with Twitter’s New Bursting Heart Icon
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