Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal on Monday took to Twitter to explain how the social media company fights fake and spam accounts on the platform.
In a series of tweets, Aggarwal began by explicitly saying that “Spam damages the experience of real people on Twitter, and can therefore harm our business. So, we need to do as much as possible every single day.” So, spam detection and removal is strongly encouraged. Anyone who suggests otherwise is wrong.”
Twitter The CEO further shared that the social media company “suspends over half a million spam accounts every day, usually any of you see them on Twitter. If we do human verification challenges (captcha, phone verification, etc.) We also lock down millions of accounts every week, which we suspect may be spam.”
The daunting challenge is that many accounts that – superficially – seem fake – are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts that are actually the most dangerous — and the ones causing the most harm to our users — may seem perfectly legitimate on the surface, he tweeted.
Agarwal said the team updates its systems and rules “frequently” to help remove as much spam as possible without mistake. suspend real people, Twitter has said that false or spam accounts represented less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users in the last quarter. Agarwal said the estimate is based on “multiple human reviews (in replication) of thousands of accounts that are randomly sampled, over time, from *accounts we count as mDAUS.”
The company’s human review process is based on its rules that define spam and platform manipulation, he said, using both public and private data such as IP addresses and geolocation to make a determination on each account. He said in a tweet, “There are a lot of details under this high-level detail that are very important. We shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing conversations with him, and all of you.”
Unfortunately, we do not believe that this specific inference can be made externally, given the significant need to use both public and private information (which we may not share). Externally, it is not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day.
Beneath this high-level detail are a lot of details that are very important. We shared an overview of the assessment process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing conversations with him and all of you, he said.