This is an interesting approach. Maybe Twitter shouldn't solve the fake accounts problem directly, maybe they should come up with an evaluation criteria and then create a market for identifying fake accounts.
If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).
I think Twitter's biggest problem with fake accounts is not that they are hard to identify, but that if they do identify them and shut them down, it'll hurt their "number of active users" stats
I suspect their big problem is more that their site is too big for the moderation staff they have at the moment. Identifying bots is easy for people sure, but it's hard to automate with AI and hiring people to proactively hunt out and shut down bots is expensive.
Of course, the fact doing it too well hurts the stats doesn't help either.
I disagree. At least it shouldn't be that hard for a company with Twitter's level of engineering and data science sophistication, and yes, I do realize that most of their best technical talent is long gone.
Their Perverse Incentive is probably to shut down fake accounts faster than they are created. Such that they are 90% effective in, say, 5 years so that the active users takes a haircut instead of a big drop.
I used to work for a company where we were explicitly told not to remove the bots as active visits because it would hurt the figures we were giving our customers. For The PM team having so much traffic was a blessing regardless where it came from. Not same problem as fake accounts but still similar.
> Not same problem as fake accounts but still similar.
Actually, I think it's almost entirely the same problem as fake accounts, from Twitter's perspective at least. It's all a measure of usage and demand by customers, and when people are used and investing/involved/compensated for that fake increase, any major drop rocks the boat.
There's an open call for papers/proposals for handling the deluge. "Funding will be provided as an unrestricted gift to the proposer's organization(s)" ... "Twitter Health Metrics Proposal Submission" https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/...
If only Twitter didn't obliterate the "third-party market" that existed in the Twitter ecosystem in the early days. I imagine we'd be seeing all sorts of solutions against bots by now, especially in third-party Twitter clients.
But no, Twitter had to "take matters in its own hands" and "control the ecosystem". Much good that brought.
If their evaluation criteria is good, they could get away with 0 cost to build the best possible system (motivated by competition on a market).