With the rise in a number of harassment and manipulation of complaints connected to various social networking services, Twitter has decided to make changes to its authentication procedure. Under the new policy to combat abuse and malicious automated accounts, all new users will require to undergo authentication.
Henceforth you will require a combination of an email address or phone number to sign up for a new Twitter account. Twitter is a place for socializing online over news and events, has long been criticised for ignoring to take stringent action against malicious actors who create multiple fake accounts. Twitter confirmed it will discuss the issues with experts to ensure the changes don’t harm the users in high-risk environments where anonymity is important.
Twitter has been going through a lot ever since it was revealed that Russian troll accounts created a division on social-media platforms during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Actions were taken by Twitter with a series of updates released to clamp down on suspicious activity.
In a blog post, Twitter said “These issues are felt around the world, from elections to emergency events and high-profile public conversations. As we have stated in recent announcements, the public health of the conversation on Twitter is a critical metric by which we will measure our success in these areas.”
Earlier this Twitter, CEO Jack Dorsey accepted that the company unintentionally helped spread misinformation, harassment, and manipulation via bots, or automated accounts. Last week Twitter acquired security startup Smyte to help fight online spam, abuse, and fraud. Along with this, the company is also developing machine learning algorithms that will proactively find a problematic account, rather than wait for them to be flagged for bad behavior. There was a staggering number of around 9.9 million potentially spam or automated accounts a week. Twitter said the average number of spam reports a day has dropped from 25,000 in March to about 17,000 in May.
The company is also developing machine learning algorithms that proactively find problematic accounts, rather than waiting until someone flags the bad behavior. In May, its system identified more than 9.9 million potentially spam or automated accounts a week, an increase from 3.2 million a week last September, Twitter said. The average number of spam reports a day has dropped from 25,000 in March to about 17,000 in May.
Twitter is also reducing the visibility of suspicious accounts. A warning sign will be placed on these accounts, and new users will be unable to follow them.
The company said it’s conducting an audit to ensure that every account created on Twitter has passed a security check to prevent automated signups. The change has already stopped more than 50,000 spam signups a day, Twitter said. Many of these accounts bulk followed high-profile accounts. As result of this action, some people may see their follower counts drop, according to the company.
The latest announcement by Twitter’s boss Dorsey’s is an effort to make it a priority to clean up the platform as Twitter seeks to increase engagement and the number of users. A transparency plan will be created to show how much political campaigns spend on advertising. There was also an effort on the part of Dorsey earlier this year, where he asked the public to propose solutions to make the social network a nicer place by measuring “collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation.”
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