Twitter has already deleted 1,500 accounts after a trolling campaign on the platform

Twitter cleans up accounts after trolling campaign. The director of security gives instructions regarding moderation.

Twitter became the target of a massive trolling campaign shortly after Elon Musk took over the company. Yoel Roth, head of security, said the move was intended to make the public believe Twitter had relaxed its rules. He also explained that the company is working to put an end to this operation, which has resulted in a significant increase in hate messages on the platform. More recently, the chief executive tweeted that the major cleanup had resulted in “significant progress”and that more than 1,500 accounts involved had been removed.

Twitter Cleans Up Accounts After Trolling Campaign

Yoel Roth explained that these 1,500 accounts revealed by this extensive campaign do not correspond to 1,500 people. “Many of them were clones,” he tweeted. The head of security also stated that the main measure of the success of content moderation is the number of impressions: this figure reflects the number of views of content by users. The company managed to reduce the number of hateful content impressions to almost zero.

Yoel Roth also detailed how the site is changing the way it enforces its content policies. He explained that the company treats user reports differently: “Because cookies do not always have full context, we analyze cookie reports more carefully to find a possible violation.”It is for this reason that third party reports on the platform are often classified as not violating its terms of use.

Director of security gives instructions regarding moderation

The security chief ended the series of tweets promising to share more on the subject. That being said, a new Bloomberg report questions how Twitter teams can enforce these rules in the coming days. Indeed, Twitter would restrict access to internal content moderation tools for most employees. Which, logically, should reduce its ability to deal with such content. The US midterm elections will be the first big test.

Bloomberg explained that restricting access to moderation tools was part of a larger plan to freeze the Twitter code during the change of ownership. Elon Musk has also reportedly asked the Twitter teams to lift some of his rules, including one that penalizes posts containing false truth about politics and Covid-19. Another one on the American multibillionaire’s radar is one that punishes posts containing attacks aimed at transgender people.

Our main metric for content moderation success is impressions: the number of times malicious content is viewed by our users. The changes we’ve made have almost completely eliminated this content from showing up in search and elsewhere on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/AnJuIu2CT6

— Yoyoel Roth (@yoyoel) October 31, 2022