“We Suspend Over Half A Million Spam Accounts Every day” – Twitter CEO Reveals

Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal has revealed that Twitter suspends over half a million spam accounts on the site every day.

In a series of tweets, the tech guru discussed extensively on the issue of Spam,  how the impacts have affected human work, and how the company works extensively to solve them.

This comes barely three days after Investors King reported the reasons Parag sacked top Twitter officers.

“First, let me state the obvious: spam harms the experience for real people on Twitter, and therefore can harm our business. As such, we are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong.

“Next, spam isn’t just ‘binary’ (human / not human). The most advanced spam campaigns use combinations of coordinated humans + automation. They also compromise real accounts, and then use them to advance their campaign. So – they are sophisticated and hard to catch.

“Some final context: fighting spam is incredibly *dynamic*. The adversaries, their goals, and tactics evolve constantly – often in response to our work! You can’t build a set of rules to detect spam today, and hope they will still work tomorrow. They will not

“We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc),” he tweeted.

Further emphasizing on the challenge the team encounters, Parag said: “many accounts that seem like spam are real accounts and they cause the most damage to other users. In retrospect to that, the team updates the systems and rules constantly to remove as much spam as possible, without inadvertently suspending real people or adding unnecessary friction for real people when they use Twitter”.

He added that the use of private data is particularly important to avoid misclassifying users who are actually real.

“FirstnameBunchOfNumbers with no profile pic and odd tweets might seem like a bot or spam to you, but behind the scenes we often see multiple indicators that it’s a real person”, he said.