In just two months Twitter has suspended 70 million accounts

n just the last two months alone Twitter has suspended 70 million accounts. This is part of a crackdown on malicious activity by users on the Twitter platform.

This information is contained in a report in the Washington Post. The suspension rate in May and June is said to be twice the rate of suspensions back in October of 2017.

Twitter under increasing pressure to stop various "bad actors"

Many have complained that Twitter has failed to stop abusive users, trolls, and spam. Particularly since the Russian ad campaign Twitter as well as Facebook have been under pressure to filter out "undesirable" tweets.

Last month, Twitter claimed it was working to improve its safety policies. It said that its “systems identified and challenged more than 9.9 million potentially spammy or automated accounts per week.”

While the change could result in a decline in users for the second quarter, a Twitter executive said that many of the accounts rarely tweeted and thus the company's active user count might not change too much. However, in its first quarter shareholder letter this year the company said that its information quality efforts had a negative impact on the number of monthly active users and that the increased vetting of accounts could very well continues to have an impact on active user numbers.

Del Harvey, Twitter's vice-president for Trust and Safety said in an interview that Twitter was changing the calculus between promoting public discourse and preserving safety. She added that Twitter has only recently been able to dedicate the resources and technical ability to target malicious behavior in the manner it is doing.

Harvey said: “One of the biggest shifts is in how we think about balancing free expression versus the potential for free expression to chill someone else’s speech. Free expression doesn’t really mean much if people don’t feel safe.” The truth is often threatening to people and of course governments as well. Free expression does not mean much if it cannot make people and governments uncomfortable.

Trump's tweet

Trump tweets: “Twitter is getting rid of fake accounts at a record pace. Will that include the Failing New York Times and propaganda machine for Amazon, the Washington Post, who constantly quote anonymous sources that, in my opinion, don’t exist. They will both be out of business in 7 years!”

Any publication that criticizes Trump he calls fake news. He has a particular dislike of Jeff Bezos CEO of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post. There are dangers in quoting anonymous sources but sometimes it cant be avoided. Often Trump has no sources but confidently asserts falsehoods as truths. Where are his sources for the statement that both papers will be out of business in 7 years?

Previously published in Digital Journal