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Tags: twitter | ban | bots | retweets | social media

Twitter Takes Action to Ban Bots

Twitter Takes Action to Ban Bots
(Damien Meyer/Getty Images) 

By    |   Wednesday, 07 February 2018 11:59 AM EST

Twitter on Tuesday rolled out a change that it says will help combat the bots, Slate reports.

Twitter replaced the metric of raw retweets with one that shows "how many people are talking about this," the social media site told Slate.

The refined metric combined retweets with replies, marginalizing the role bots play in retweeting. There are bots that automatically reply to tweets but not as many, Slate reports.

Russian-linked bots, for example, retweeted then candidate Donald Trump 10 times more than Hillary Clinton in the weeks leading up to the election.

Retweets were universally viewed as the key popularity metric by users, giving bots undue influence over Twitter's platform.

Twitter is also in the midst of purging Russian-backed bots, with 50,000 having been removed so far, Slate reports. Further, Twitter says it blocks more than 500,000 suspicious logins every day.

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Twitter on Tuesday rolled out a change that it says will help combat the bots, Slate reports.
twitter, ban, bots, retweets, social media
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2018-59-07
Wednesday, 07 February 2018 11:59 AM
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