James Delahunty
10 Jul 2018 6:16
According to the Washington Post, Twitter purged more than 70 million accounts from the service since May.
The purge is part of Twitter's effort to fight against bots operating on its network, and also against "trolls" who abuse the company's terms of service. According to the report, many of the suspicious and fake accounts are remotely controlled bots that present all kinds of problems and threats.
A Twitter spokesperson told the Post that the purge was nothing new and was part of work to improve the health of the public conservation on Twitter.
He added that Twitter also took action against 142,000 applications responsible for spammy tweets on the social network.
As services like Twitter and Facebook take action against fake accounts, those responsible for them tend to change their ways to avoid detection. As new technologies including conversational AI become more widespread, it will be a much more difficult task to determine if an account represents a real individual or not.