Twitter will challenge millions of user accounts each week in an effort to differentiate humans from bots, the social media announced.
It's long overdue, but Twitter's latest efforts come after reports pointing out that its platform is swarming with bot accounts, which can be used for malicious purposes. For years, users have been reporting about the social network's trove of fake accounts and bots.
Fake accounts have created a huge problem for tech companies after Russian trolls took advantage of social networking sites during the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States. Twitter Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal acknowledged the bot problem, saying that many accounts are entirely automated while other accounts are bots with "people in the loop." There are also accounts operated by humans, which are either hacked or are intended to exploit communications.
Twitter is using technology to monitor a huge number of accounts and their behavior in order to detect patterns. If the algorithm detects unnatural use or "anomalies," moderators will investigate whether these accounts are authentic or not.
Agrawal admitted that detecting fake accounts is no easy task. Through the years, it has become much harder to determine whether an account is indeed run by a human and not a bot. However, he pointed out an emerging pattern on fake accounts these days: "The most dangerous fake accounts actually don't look fake on the surface," Agrawal said.
Bots are designed to perform certain tasks and not all are used for malicious purposes. In fact, there are bots used to detect malicious intentions and lean up sites, like the ones Wikipedia use. But on Twitter, there are hardly helpful bots at all. Most bots often pose as ordinary users.
It's become problematic for Twitter, given the platform gives its users a lot of freedom. Unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn't hard censor NSFW content and users are allowed to use aliases, too.
Though Twitter has this massive bot problem, most major social media platforms are launching a crackdown on bots as well. Through the years, social media has become a tool not just for communication, but also as a news source. People are more likely to read the news on social media so much that it's become a breeding ground for misinformation.
In 2018, Twitter had to remove over 1 million suspected bot accounts each day. That year alone, over 70 million fake accounts were removed. Now the company has added a checkmark-style system so users can easily differentiate which are authentic accounts from fake ones.
