How is Twitter Battling Fake News and Abuse? By Doing Not Much

Bots are an epidemic on Twitter. PTI reported earlier in March 2017 that a study from the American universities, University of Southern California and Indiana University found a remarkable 48 million accounts or 15 percent of active Twitter accounts are social bots and not actual people.

Such news becomes disturbing when a voter’s decision making is influenced by strength of a politician’s social media presence during key events like elections.

For instance take this quote from The Atlantic on the 2016 US Presidential election:

“Political campaigns worldwide now use bots, software developed to automatically do tasks online, as a means for gaming online polls and artificially inflating social-media traffic. Recent analysis by our research team at Oxford University reveals that more than a third of pro-Trump tweets and nearly a fifth of pro-Clinton tweets between the first and second debates came from automated accounts, which produced more than 1 million tweets in total. This data corroborates recent reports suggesting that both candidates’ social media followings are highly automated.”

In response to a story on BWDisrupt which said, Narendra Modi had more fake followers than any other Indian personality, a Twitter spokesperson said, “…In general, fake followers are covered by our Spam Policy located here: https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311. Any account that is reported to us as Spam will be reviewed and can be suspended/terminated if found violating our Spam Policy."

And what is Twitter doing about fake news? Not much besides pushing it to the bottom of the page because anything else goes against Twitter ethos.

Anupam Dikhit, the global brand lead for APAC and MENA regions for Twitter said at Building India Inc. held at IIT Delhi, “We bring news in 140 characters. My role at Twitter is getting brands which include media companies to use the platform as part of their marketing strategy.

Twitter has been dealing with fake news and malicious tweets for a very long time as a first port of news online. The idea of any technology platform is that the users monitor the content. It is not physically feasible to monitor every piece of content. So for that same reason we don’t take down tweets either. The idea here is that users will report if something is right or wrong, ultimately they are the best judge of what they consume.

Finally one thing to keep in mind is that at Twitter we always stand for protecting our users first. News in Syria, Turkey, Iraq or wherever is widely covered [which more often than not may be of a disturbing nature]. We do not take down content which may be against a particular regime, politician or belief. The point of having a digital platform is that users are part of the team bringing news to other fellow users. Sometimes it is easy to have this policy turned on its face because with technology it has become much easier to disseminate news faster. And the bad news will spread faster than any other kind.

So we try to empower people to report fake, inaccurate or malicious content faster. We try to identify the people spreading fake news or those trolling others and proactively reduce the harmful effect from such behaviour.

A recent rollout we had was that anything reported as abusive will be pushed to the bottom so that users will be less likely to see it. We are still not taking it off, because that’s an inherent policy for us but we are making sure the chances of abusive content giving offense is reduced.”