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Twitter, the social network on which you can share posts larger than 280 characters, announced that it will stop counting accounts considered suspicious by the number of followers displayed in each profile. Robots and spam accounts will not be affected by the operation, but millions of profiles that Twitter has blocked because it has not been able to confirm their affiliation to a truly existing person.
The consequence will be that followed, those with tens of millions of followers will register a visible drop in their subscribers. The "moria" of the disciples should begin to be visible from Thursday, but the reporter of Washington Post Elizabeth Dwoskin has already reported a decrease of 100 thousand followers in the account of US President Donald Trump, and 400 a thousand from that of former President Barack Obama. The first has 53.4 million followers, the second 104 million.
Celebrities, your Twitter follows on the tank. The follower account for @realDonaldTrump just lost 100K. @BarackObama lost 400K. https://t.co/4PVCIksvUd
– Elizabeth Dwoskin (@lizzadwoskin) 11 July 2018
The accounts in question are not the commonly defined robots, that is, the Automatic robots often used for spam or political propaganda, but another type of suspicious profiles. Twitter explained that these are accounts for which it detects a "sudden change in behavior", such as the publication for no reason of a large number of responses or mentions, fraudulent links, or that have been blocked by many others. accounts after a mention. In this case, Twitter contacts the email account badociated with the profile asking to confirm the property and change the pbadword: if it is not, they are blocked and can not log in anymore. The difference with the bots, Twitter explained, is that most of these accounts were originally opened by real people.
These blocked accounts can not retweet the tweets of other users, but until now they have continued to appear follower accounts that have followed. According to the New York Times tens of millions of blocked accounts will be involved in this operation: in total, the total number of followers of all users will decrease by 6%. Most users will lose "four subscribers or less," while those with millions of subscribers will experience larger declines. "We realize that for some it can be difficult, but we believe that accuracy and transparency will make Twitter a safer place for public conversations."
Twitter is an attempt to counter the widespread practice of buying blocks of fake followers, which leads to a delegitimation of influence on the social network obtained from accounts with true followers. False accounts are also a problem for advertising sales: with the Twitter operation hopes to offer advertisers more guarantees that their advertisements will reach real people. This is the latest in a series of operations adopted by Twitter in recent months to counter the spread of bots and fake accounts, and make the social network a better place for public debate.
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