Twitter has suspended approximately 70 million accounts from May to July in a bid to eliminate fake accounts on the social network. Speaking to The Washington Post, sources at Twitter said the rate of account suspensions has more than doubled since October last year and over 1 million accounts were suspended a day in recent months.
The Washington Post added that the change in enforcement could cause a decline in users for the company’s second quarter, although a Twitter executive told the publication that many of the accounts rarely tweeted. As such it would therefore not dramatically impact the company’s active user count.
Twitter has been long been facing pressure from the public to stop trolls and spam and has revealed in a blog post that it “had been working to improve its safety policies.” In October, Twitter also launched the Advertising Transparency Center in a bid to “dramatically” boost transparency for all ads on its platform, including political and issue-based ads.
The Advertising Transparency Center looks to provide users visibility into who is advertising on Twitter, details behind the ads such as how long they are currently running or have been running. Feedback tools are also available for users to either report inappropriate ads or offer negative feedback, allowing Twitter to show users more relevant ads in their timeline.
However, Twitter is not the only social media platform under scrutiny by the public. Recently, Facebook had suspended 200 apps on its platform following an investigation to which ones had access to large amounts of information. This applied to apps affected by its 2014 platform policy change, which reduced the amount of data the apps could access.
