Twitter admits to having verified several fake accounts

Twitter says it has permanently suspended a “small number” of fake accounts that it mistakenly verified just weeks after relaunching its public verification program, the Daily point reports. The blunder was revealed after data scientist Conspirador Norteño discovered six verified accounts which premiered recently on June 16. Neither had posted a single tweet, and two used what appeared to be archival photographs for profile photos.

“We mistakenly approved requests to verify a small number of (fake) inauthentic accounts,” Twitter told the Daily point in a report. “We have now permanently suspended the accounts in question and removed their verified badges, as part of our platform manipulation and spam policy. “

The incident suggests that Twitter’s verification process is having issues and failing to detect clearly inauthentic types of accounts that shouldn’t be worthy of the platform’s coveted blue badge. Twitter recently relaunched public verification apps with a revamped set of eligibility criteria based on the idea that an account should be “”genuine, notable and active”To be worthy of verification. Obviously, the accounts identified were none of these.

As Norteño explains in a Twitter thread, the six accounts shared 976 suspicious followers – all created between June 19 and 20 – and many of them used AI-generated profile pictures. In total, Norteño says they were part of a botnet made up of at least 1,212 accounts.

As of this writing, Twitter has suspended five of the six verified accounts, while the sixth appears to have deactivated its own profile. The “majority” of the support botnet has also been removed, says Norteño. But the incident raises questions about how the accounts may have been verified in the first place and why Twitter’s processes failed to report them before they were discovered by a third-party researcher.