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I lost 120 subscribers on Twitter last night. US President Donald Trump lost 340,000, the New York Times 732,000, the former US President Barack Obama three million or so. Even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has lost 200,000 in his company's highly publicized crackdown on suspicious accounts.
But what looks like a major purge is more like a public relations attack, Twitter and Facebook trying to outdo each other to show that they care about the health of the conversation on the social network
before purging in a blog, explaining that most of the targeted accounts were not robots. They were mostly set up by real people, she wrote, "but we can not confirm that the person who opened the account still has control and access."
To confirm this, Twitter tells account owners to change their pbadword. Accounts for which this does not happen are "locked"; after a month, they stop counting towards the total number of Twitter users. Now, they no longer consider followers.
The interesting part here is how Twitter determines that there is something wrong. According to Gadde, the trigger is usually a sudden change in the behavior of an account. He could start tweeting "a large volume of unsolicited answers or mentions" or "misleading links". The same behavior in a new account also triggers the alarm ringing: the algorithms identify the account as potentially "spammed or automated" and "defy" its owner, for example by asking him to confirm a phone number. Twitter reports a sharp increase in the number of disputed accounts, from just over 2.5 million in September to 10 million in May. Given that Twitter had 226 million active users per month in the first quarter of 2018, this sounds like a lot – but only until we look at Facebook's recent report on a similar activity
. false accounts, down from 694 million in the fourth quarter of 2017. It's about 27pc of Facebook's monthly active users in the first quarter. But of course, Facebook has not decimated its user base – this would have pushed up the course of the action. He explained that he killed the fake accounts just as the malicious actors tried to save them. The idea is that Facebook's user base is not inflated, it only contains 3 to 4pc of fake accounts, but it would have been inflated with fake if it had not been detected algorithms that, according to the company, detected 98.5pc of fake before users report them
Facebook's criteria for spotting false accounts are similar to those of Twitter: repeated publication of the same content, sudden increase in the number of messages sent and other patterns of activity. Twitter and Facebook also have systems to stop automatic registration of accounts.
But at the operating scale of social networks, even a very high detection rate makes it possible to add millions of fake accounts each month. Of the 583 million fake Facebook accounts deleted in the first three months of this year, the algorithms spotted 98.5pc. This means that users reported the rest, 8.7 million accounts.
In an article published in 2017, a team of Canadian researchers showed that requests to create Internet accounts on Instagram on Facebook belonged to Facebook. cases. Detection technology may be working better now, but social networks still do not know exactly how they work. Whatever the case may be, the market for fake adepts and forgers is still flourishing.
The automatic detection of misappropriated false accounts is a flourishing academic field because social networks are demanding significant resources for this work. and even do it manually where the algorithms fail. Facebook, for example, admits that its technology is better at detecting nudity than hate speech, which is reported algorithmically in only 38% of cases before users report it.
No police force can prevent 100pc of crimes. Social networks are increasingly making their public policing efforts so that users, and society, can start thinking about it in the following ways: they do what they can, but we can not prevent some bad things. But technically, nothing prevents Twitter and Facebook from setting up an identification procedure that would make automatic registration impossible.
While they are trying to navigate between the nuisances of spam and the false news on the one hand, social networks can only strengthen the public relations activity around their anti-countermeasures efforts. the fake. In the process, they do their best not to hurt the number of users that their investors follow religiously. Does this approach improve the health of the social network conversation?
My answer, up to now, is no. Your experience could be different. To find out, say something combative on Twitter and see what happens.
Bloomberg
Sunday Indo Business
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