The issue with Russian disinformation that took place during the 2016 US elections gave way to the beginning stages of one of the most massive account suspension activities in social media so far. Twitter suspended 58 million accounts from their platform in order to take care of malicious and suspicious accounts that have plagued the network.
Some questioned if this could affect the user base growth for this platform, but the truth is that a large number of prominent users of the community found this to be an excellent way to increase the safety and quality of the traffic within the platform. An issue that is highly relevant and important to every single social media network.
The idea is to improve information quality and the best way to make this happen is to ensure the suspension of as many fake accounts and bots that are constantly being created. The 58 million suspended accounts don’t really create a problem for the network because they still have over 300 million active users every month.
It seems like the follower counts have been affected by the purge but this means that those users are not legitimate and it’s better for them to be subtracted from the follower numbers. This is good for the Twitter users who have paid for legitimate promotion for their pages and thy have received bots and fake accounts instead of legitimate user engagement. It allows them to look into their current efforts and results.
It seems like stock value has dropped for the platform because of this important number of users, but that has also been a temporary issue with the platform constantly rising in popularity. Twitter has been very public about their stats and their measures to keep the platform legitimate and optimal.
Final thoughts
It’s very important for all social media platforms to take the time to look into their current user base and get rid of fake accounts and bots. Facebook has already done this several times and Twitter is definitely very firm in their pursuit of accounts that seem to be illegitimate.
The value of this process is that engagement and interactions are going to be much stronger for users and business owners. The lower the number of fake accounts, the higher the number of legitimate users that can be targeted by marketers. This is essential for campaigns to be successful.
Sharon Callix
Award Winning Social Media Expert
International Speaker
www.sharoncallix.co
