Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the social network should disable 8.5 million to 10 million accounts each week throughout 2018 due to automation and spam.
As Dorsey stated, Twitter has been “blocking” up to 530 thousand suspicious connections per day, doubling the amount it had to deal with the previous year.
To do all of the above, Twitter had and continues to have to design new bot tools to automate the process of detecting and combating automated accounts.
Most of the tools they use identify accounts with suspicious behavior such as a large number of tweets using the same hashtag or mentioning the same account without ever receiving a response.
“These technological improvements have led to a corresponding decrease in the number of spam reports from people on Twitter,” Dorsey said. “The number of reports in March of this year was about 25,000 per day, that number dropped to 17,000 in August.”
Additionally, Dorsey also cited the increasing number of cases in which the social network uses pre-programmed challenges like reCAPTCHA, as well as password reset requests for accounts that may be compromised.
As an additional firewall to protect Twitter users from malicious behavior, the social network is working on introducing mandatory mobile phone verification and email verification for all new accounts.
