Twitter Suspends Over 70 Million Accounts in Two Months: Washington Post
Bengaluru: Twitter suspended more than one million accounts a day in recent months to reduce flow of misinformation on the platform, reported the Washington Post.
Twitter and other social media platforms such as Facebook have been under increasing scrutiny by US lawmakers and international regulators for doing too little to prevent the spread of false content.
The companies have been taking steps such as deleting user accounts, introducing updates and actively monitoring content to help users avoid being a victim to fake content.
Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, and the pace has continued in July, reported the Post on Friday, citing data it had obtained.
"It's hard to believe that 70 million accounts were affected when Twitter has only 336 million Monthly Active Users (MAU)," said Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter.
Twitter's MAU is expected to grow nearly 3% to 337.06 in the second quarter, according to Thomson Reuters.
"My guess is that a large number of these suspended accounts were dormant ... (s0) it should have little impact on the company", said Pachter to Reuters.
If the 70 million were mostly active accounts, the affected accounts would have been "screaming bloody murder", he added.
According to a source from the Washington Post, however, the aggressive removal of unwanted accounts may result in a rare decline in the number of monthly users in the second quarter.
"Due to technology and process improvements during the past year, we are now removing 214% more accounts for violating our spam policies on a year-on-year basis," said the company in a blog post last month.
In May, it identified and challenged more than 9.9 million "potentially spammy" or automated accounts per week, compared with 6.4 million in December 2017.
On a related note, shares of Twitter fell marginally to $46.50 after the bell on Friday.
(Reuters)
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