Eli5: Why is it so hard for social media companies to remove spam and Bot accounts?
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Elon Musk asked this very question at a public venture capital forum the other day. It was somewhat rhetorical in his case, since he provided the answer that good programming and data analysis can detect and remove bots, but it is also a very practical question for him, since his preliminary analysis of Twitter says that 20% to 50% of the accounts are bots.
Twitter claims the number is around 5%, but he has already ruled that number out as too low. Twitter being 90% bots has not yet been ruled out.
Ideally you authenticate each account by doing something like
– Get a phone number
– Send them a text with a confirmation code or pin number
– Require the PIN to be returned via Twitter, within 5 or 30 minutes.
– Cross-check the list of phone numbers so that multiple accounts cannot give you the same phone number.
– The country the applicant claims to be from should also match the country code of the phone number.
There are other checks that can be done. One of the ones I like best is to give the applicant a dollar. It is unlikely that a bot would have a bank account, or paypal account, or some other unique means of receiving a payment.
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