Twitter to delete millions of accounts

Twitter will run a major operation to delete accounts of fake followers, Vijaya Gadde, its president in charge of trust and safety has announced.

Gadde said the clean-up will affect accounts that were frozen over the years for
suspicious behavior.

“This week, we’ll be removing these locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down,” she wrote in a statement.

The New York Times said Twitter planned to begin deleting tens of millions of accounts starting Thursday, slashing the total followership by six percent.

The measure is reportedly aimed at users who have inflated their followships by paying for automated accounts to fake social media influence.

The social media platform has 336 million active users.

In May, it identified and challenged more than 9.9 million “potentially spammy” or automated accounts per week, compared with 6.4 million in December 2017.