Twitter has been putting quite a bit of weight behind eradicating the rampant issue of fake accounts and spambots greatly influencing many people"s experience on its platform, to the point where the company, in its Q2 earnings report, saw itself lose over a million (fake) users.
The company"s pursuit of a mostly bot-free platform continues, in the form of a new feature for users who choose to report a certain account: the option to report an account as fake.
This doesn"t exactly make any headway into providing users with greater transparency into its reporting process, something many have been asking for, but the increased granularity here is certainly handy to have; one could already report accounts for other reasons of course, but the addition of this specific option will most likely help crowdsource - and streamline - its process to pinpoint spam accounts. Indeed, a Twitter spokesperson said on this matter:
“The new reporting flow will allow us to collect more detailed information so we can identify and remove spam more effectively. With more details to review, we’ll be adding more resources to our review processes.”
Given Twitter is currently bleeding users the sheer numbers of which - despite being fake - have thus far had a tendency to please shareholders, it"s certainly a nice change of pace to see the company not let the issue get worse than it already has. Only time, however, will tell how profound the effect of Twitter"s efforts will be, but here"s hoping it"s worth the trouble.