The Twitter purge solves nothing

I lost 120 Twitter followers overnight. President Donald Trump lost 340,000, the New York Times 732,000, former President Barack Obama 3 million or so. Even Twitter’s chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, lost 200,000 in his company’s much-hyped crackdown on dubious accounts. But what looks like a major purge is more like a public relations onslaught, as Twitter and Facebook try to outdo each other at showing they care about the health of the social network conversation.
Top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde had alerted users before the purge in a blog post, explaining that most of the accounts the company was targeting weren’t bots. They were mostly set up by real people, she wrote, “but we cannot confirm that the original person who opened the account still has control and access to it.” To confirm this, Twitter tells the supposed account owners to solve a captcha or change their password. The accounts for which this doesn’t happen get “locked”; after a month, they stop counting towards Twitter’s total user number. Now, they no longer pad follower counts, either.
The interesting part here is how Twitter determines that there’s something wrong with an account. According to Gadde’s post, the trigger is usually a sudden change in an account’s behaviour. Suddenly, it might start tweeting “a large volume of unsolicited replies or mentions” or “misleading links.”
The same behaviour in a new account also sets off alarm bells: Twitter’s algorithms identify the account as potentially “spammy or automated” and “challenges” its owner, for example by asking her to confirm a phone number.
Twitter reports a large increase in the number of accounts challenged in this way — from slightly more than 2.5 million in September to 10 million in May. Given that Twitter had 226 million monthly active users in the first quarter of 2018, that looks like a large number — but only until one looks at Facebook’s recent report purporting to document similar activity.
On the scale on which the social networks operate, even a very high detection rate still allows millions of fake accounts to be added every month. Of the 583 million fake accounts Facebook removed in the first three months of this year, algorithms spotted 98.5 percent.
The automatic detection of fake or hijacked accounts is a flourishing academic field because there’s demand from the social network companies, which are willing to devote significant resources to this work — and even to do it manually where algorithms fail. Facebook, for example, admits that its technology is better at detecting nudity than hate speech, which is flagged algorithmically in just 38 percent of the cases before users report it. It’s better to spend heavily on detection than to face public outrage and regulatory scrutiny in the wake of fake news and election interference scandals.

— Bloomberg

Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics and business. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion
website Slon.ru