Twitter will be challenging millions of users per week to know if a person or bot runs their accounts, the social media announced.
Users have also protested about the platform's influence of bots and fake accounts for years. Researchers are consistently pointing out to the use of enormous swarms of bot accounts for malicious purposes in particular to increase certainty.
The use of fake accounts had also been a significant concern for tech companies after Russian trolls used social media platforms during the 2016 US presidential election to sow discord.
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Bad people use bots for propaganda
Twitter Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal said there are specific types of fake accounts that bad users can use, CNET reported.
Many accounts are entirely automated, and other accounts are bots with "people in the loop." There are also accounts run by humans attempting to exploit communications and accounts which are hacked and then used by bad actors.
"Any attempt to manipulate the conversation actually applies some combination of all four of these potential to do so," he said.
Apart from questioning accounts, Agrawal said that every month Twitter suspends millions of accounts until a user sees them on their pages or in search results.
The company is using technology, he said, to monitor a large number of accounts' behaviors, and to detect patterns. When Twitter sees "anomalies" that can not be explained by "natural use," the company knows whether it will investigate any accounts or not.
It's not always easy to figure out whether a Twitter account is fake, he said. Agrawal explained there are accounts with no profile image and a limited number of tweets that look like bots but are actually run by humans. Additionally, Twitter lets people use pseudonyms.
Still, he said, it's not the fake-looking accounts that are potentially the most problematic. "The most dangerous fake accounts actually don't look fake on the surface," he said.
Lots and lots of bots
The total amount of automated bot accounts operating on Twitter is not officially counted. Several studies have tied the amount to approximately 15%. With over 330 million users, that means a whole lot of non-human actors - 49.5 million to be exact. That's, in reality, approximately equal to the entire California and Michigan population combined.
Bots are varying complexity software programs that are configured to perform certain tasks, be they legitimate or malicious. These aren't all evil. For example, Wikipedia hires bots to clean up sites, detect vandals and malicious page edits, make suggestions, and greet newcomers on its site.
However, when people talk about bots in Twitter's context, they don't refer to helpful bots, but rather bots that often pose as ordinary users.
Often, though not always, Twitter's generic egg-shaped avatar assigns users as a default. Digital Trends wrote that these accounts are usually known to help spread fake news and peddle conspiracy theories.
Cracking down on bots
There have been concerted attempts throughout social media platforms to crack down on bots. Given that the future of social media firms depends on their exponential ability to expand a user base, a significant effort has also been made to deal with the bot problem. For example, in 2018, Twitter began removing suspected bot accounts at a rate of over 1 million a day.
It had already removed over 70 million fake accounts that year alone. Recently, a new checkmark-style system has been explored to make it more obvious which users are bots, and which people are actual.
Last month, Twitter updated its Developer API policy to mention that developers need to explicitly indicate their user bio or profile "whether they're running a bot account, what the account is, and who the person behind it is. So it's easier for anyone on Twitter to know what a bot is - and what isn't." It also introduced a new page designed to help users sort bots from non-bots.
