Twitter Inc. (NASDAQ:TWTR) has stepped up in order to sharpen up its efforts to fight fake news!
According to recent reports, The micro-blogging platform has been keen at waging up a fight against fake Twitter profiles and the spread of misinformation. The social media player goes on a spit and polish spree up its platform, ahead of the U.S. Midterm elections.
The company apparently has wiped out more than 50 twitter accounts, who were allegedly misrepresenting themselves as members of some state Republican parties. Reportedly, in the month of August, Twitter roughed up against some tweets about elections and political fiasco which were quite misleading in nature. Since then it has-been working cautiously to paddle over incorrect or unauthenticated information and clearly states its integrity oriented take in a recent blog post!
Additionally, it has been expanding its think-tank resources to be conscious of identifying fake accounts in the first place. This will include a close examination of stock or seized avatar pictures as well as stolen biographies that indicate misleading information about certain accounts.
And it’s not just Twitter who has ramped up its take on fighting Fake news! Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube have also escalated their efforts to fight any negative imprint ahead of U.S midterm election.
This is no hush-hush story that how these platforms have, at some point in time, bolstered fiddlers to meddle in American politics. As a present exhibit, Bloomberg reported that how the Kremlin-backed Russian Internet Research Agency operated accounts pretending to be official political organizations tried to influence elections.
How Twitter Aims at Fighting Malicious Automation?
Twitter, for quite some time now, has been fighting malicious automation strategically, one at a time. It focuses on identifying misleading accounts first, hinting at malicious behaviour rather than lie low till a misconduct is reported.
Several machine learning tools and algorithms have been devised and improvised to identify and take necessary action on spambots automatically.
According to a blog post by Twitter, several measures were taken in consonance with the growing need to address such attempts. These are the findings :
- May 2018, Twitter identified and took action on more than 9.9 million spam or automated accounts per week. This accounted to be more from 6.4 million in December 2017.
- The average number of spam reports have dropped to a large extent – From an average of 25,000 per day to 17,000 per day in the month of May.
- More than 70 million accounts suspended by Twitter in May and June 2018.
- There was also a drop of 10 per cent in spam reports from search as a result option.
Twitter Leveraging an Integrity-Oriented Platform!
“One of the biggest shifts is in how we think about balancing free expression versus the potential for free expression to chill someone else’s speech. Free expression doesn’t really mean much if people don’t feel safe.”- Del Harvey, Twitter’s Vice President for Trust and Safety
Twitter’s Vice President for Trust and Safety, Del Harvey talked about the shift in the strategy between public discourse measures and the safety guidelines. She went on to add that Twitter as of now chose to dedicate its resource to target malicious behaviour in a more efficient way, as well as enhance its technical stratagem.
Twitter’s escalated battle, with the suspension of more than one million accounts a day in recent months, has been like a fog-horn; loud and clear. It is a major ramp in order to diminish the flow of misleading news on the platform.
