In other words, despite the vast majority of @greensboro_nc’s followers being comprised of fake/bot/inactive accounts, they were also quite successful in driving real accounts to follow. As you can see below, 275 of my Twitter followers were following @greensboro_nc, an account that was falsely representing Greensboro, North Carolina:

Note: the “(Not The Government)” portion of their bio was added shortly before the account was suspended

India: Where Manipulated Twitter Polls Run Rampant

Two months ago I discovered a family of Indian polling accounts. The group even had several verified accounts as part of its network. Effectively fake/bot accounts were being used to manipulate tweet polls (pushing a pro-Narendra Modi/BJP agenda).

I tweeted about the operation on Jun 30th (after observing it for a month):

A few days later some of the main accounts were suspended by Twitter (coverage from The Indian Express).

Similar to the North Carolina family of accounts, I immediately notified several Twitter execs/senior employees when I initially discovered these shenanigans (and prior to the above tweet from Jun 30th). As was the case previously, Twitter simply didn’t seem to have any sense of urgency.

Turns out several Twitter India employees (including @Raheelk) had been warned about @MyVoteToday over the years; additionally, Alt News did a nice job exposing MyVoteToday back in May 2017:

Tweeted Jul 2nd, 2018

Tweeted Jul 5th, 2018

For those that didn’t closely review the tweets, it’s important to highlight that MyVoteToday would frequently promote their (vile) poll tweets.

Was Twitter India knowingly allowing them to promote manipulated polls simply to collect advertising revenue? Jack Dorsey talks a lot about transparency. Twitter should have to disclose how much advertising revenue was earned via MyVoteToday-affiliated accounts to-date.

Moreover, in deleting the accounts, Twitter is deleting evidence (as is also the case with the North Carolina accounts).

There’s much more to this India/MyVoteToday story, but I’ll save that for a separate post!

Elections Integrity

Last week it was announced that Twitter will be (further) delaying revising their account verification process. According to Twitter’s product lead, Kayvon Beykpour, his team will be pausing their work on retooling verification as the task “isn’t a top priority” for them currently.

Here’s an excerpt from an email that Beykpour sent to Twitter’s health leadership team: “ I don’t believe we have the bandwidth to address [account verification] holistically without coming at the cost of other priorities and distracting the team.. We’re already doing way too many things, and focusing on this now will slow us down and lessen the quality of more important areas like elections integrity.”

If elections integrity is such an important area, why does Twitter continually ignore the tips/direction provided by researchers on this front?

There is no excuse for Twitter taking so long to act re: the North Carolina and MyVoteToday family of accounts. Both instances involved accounts which, over the years, had been reported to Twitter on multiple occasions. Both instances involved the use of fake/bot accounts (both for social proof and amplification purposes) to spread political propaganda.

While it’s great to see Twitter say they’ll be taking elections integrity more seriously, ultimately those are just words; moreover, they’re words which don’t align with Twitter’s previous actions.

Point Of Clarification

The recent Twitter Purge is most certainly a step in the right direction, but it’s the tip of the iceberg. It’s a shame that it took Twitter so long to even take this step, and I suspect it had lots to due with being pushed by Unilever’s Keith Weed.

Many people, it seems, have misinterpreted the Twitter Purge to mean that Twitter has removed all fake/bot/inactive accounts. That is not what took place. Twitter simply removed suspicious accounts (which were locked) from Followers count. Some of those, no doubt, are fake/bot accounts. Those accounts still appear in Following count, and have not been suspended/removed.

Geoff De Weaver

I began this post by highlighting a number of accounts which were materially impacted by the Twitter Purge. One of those accounts was @geoff_deweaver, having lost ~430K followers (54% of the account’s followers):

The @geoff_deweaver account went from 979K followers to 449K followers, losing 530K followers during the Twitter Purge

Out of the account’s last 3.2K tweets, 2,079 (65%) were retweets. Here are some of @geoff_deweaver’s retweets — descending from most retweeted — and the accounts which were most frequently retweeted: