Over 1,000,000 Accounts Are Being Deleted Per Day in The Latest Twitter Ban Wave

• Twitter is suspending over a million accounts each day after criticism against the platform by US Congress members and social media platforms.
• Twitter has been recently accused of allowing bots, hate speech, and propaganda to be prevalent on the platform.
• The ban wave started in May, and over 70 million accounts have been removed so far.

With US Congress officials, social media users and other renowned personalities criticizing Twitter for not dealing with bots, hate speech, and propaganda; the social media platform is finally taking action and banning suspicious accounts. Over 70 million accounts have been banned so far during May and June, which accounts for over a million accounts banned every day and the ban wave is still continuing.

Twitter had already pushed out a smaller ban wave that removed thousands of accounts earlier this year. Most of the accounts banned in the current ban wave appear to be bots and spam accounts. The platform is also preventing spam accounts from being created with over 50,000 accounts being blocked each day before they even become active. The social media platform is trying to make amends following the recent criticism by setting new rules in place for political advertisers.

Twitter revealed earlier this year that 5% of the active user base are spam or fake accounts and another 8.5% are bots. Some of the bot accounts are run by automation tools and can be legitimate and are not banned. IFFTT is a popular automation tool that can allow users to tweet from RSS feeds or other useful information, which does not count as spam. Twitter also acquired Smyte, to make use of the software's anti-spam capabilities.

However, third-party organizations came up with different opinions on the percentage of fake users on Twitter. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) estimated that 15% of the social media platform’s user base to be bots while co-founder of TwitterAudit David Caplan estimated that a staggering 40-60% users are bots.

While the move by Twitter benefits the user experience and improve information quality, it can deliver a big hit to the user base numbers and other important metrics that are relevant to the company's earnings reports. The company revealed that 336 million accounts were active in Q1 2018, but the ongoing ban wave has already reduced it by 70 million.

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