Twitter is reportedly removing 6 to 7.5 million fake accounts per week

Fake news and spam have been plaguing social media giants like Facebook and Twitter for some time now. As we approach elections in the country, it becomes ever so important that fake accounts spreading false propaganda be contained. Facebook is removing nearly a million accounts a day and Twitter is doing something similar as well.[caption id="attachment_4227201" align="alignnone" width="1280"]

Twitter logo . Reuters[/caption]Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, said in an interview with the YouTube channel SmarterEveryDay that Twitter is removing 6 million to 7.5 million accounts per week or about 10 to 12 accounts a second to fight 'platform manipulation'.

"Eight to 10 million accounts a week are challenged automatically, and more than three-quarters of those accounts wind up removed automatically from the service,” Roth said in the interview. The video is part of a series by SmarterEveryDay which explains how algorithmic manipulation is attacking YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.As per a report by Fast Company, if Twitter thinks that an account is spam, it can set out a “challenge,” which includes things like verifying a phone number, solving a reCAPTCHA or resetting its password.According to a report by TechCrunch, Twitter is also limiting the number of accounts that can be followed by a user in a day. In a tweet sent out by Twitter Safety, the number of accounts one can follow per day has been brought down from 1,000 to 400.

In more recent developments concerning fake news, the Supreme Court has refused to hear a PIL filed by a lawyer, Anuja Kapur, which sought guidelines from the Indian government to frame rules aimed at stopping the circulation and publication of fake news.As per ANI, a bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi decided to ignore the public interest litigation (PIL) for now, focussing its time on another PIL, which sought action against political parties if their spokespersons and representatives delivered a speech and made remarks in media pertaining to religion or caste.