New users will have to confirm an email address or phone number to register an account.
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By Steven Musi, CNET
Twitter is making changes to address abuse and malicious automated
accounts in the face of criticism it doesn't do enough to curb
harassment and manipulation on its service.
The social media platform says it's seen a dramatic increase in the
number of spammy or automated accounts being created each week. Last
month, its machine learning tools identified nearly 10 million
potentially fake or spammy accounts being created weekly, up from 3.2
million in September.
Under rules announced Tuesday, new Twitter
users will be required to confirm either an email address or phone
number when signing up for an account. Twitter also plans to reduce the
visibility of spammy accounts by removing them from follower figures and
engagement counts until they can pass a challenge such as confirming a
phone number.
"We think this is an important shift in how we
display tweet and account information to ensure that malicious actors
aren't able to artificially boost an account's credibility permanently
by inflating metrics like the number of followers," Twitter said in a blog post.
The
social network boasts 330 million user accounts, which tweet about
everything from social issues to the latest tech news and represent
everyone from Katy Perry to Pope Francis. But a New York Times investigation found that millions of accounts on the service may be fake, created to help celebrities hawk products and to make "influencers" appear to have more -- well, influence.
The
new approaches come as Twitter deals with revelations that
Russian-linked social media troll accounts may've influenced the outcome
of the 2016 US presidential election. Twitter told congressional
investigators in January that Russian botsshared Donald Trump's tweets almost 470,000 times between Sept. 1 and Nov. 15, 2016. During that same time frame, the Russian-linked accounts retweeted candidate Hillary Clinton less than 50,000 times.
"These
issues are felt around the world, from elections to emergency events
and high-profile public conversations," Twitter said in its blog post
Tuesday. "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 year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asked users for ideas on how to fix its service
after acknowledging that his influential social network has an
extremely toxic side and that his team had underestimated its
"real-world negative consequences." Twitter, he acknowledged, has
"witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots
and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns and increasingly
divisive echo chambers."
Over the past few years in particular, Twitter has become a central stage for abuse, be it revenge porn, attack mobs, privacy violations, death threats or attempts to sway elections.
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