Published 11th Dec, 2022

By Joseph Adeiye

Elon Musk, the Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, has confirmed his intention to deactivate over 10 million accounts on the microblogging platform on Sunday.

Musk tweeted that the accounts, which are software controlled, would be surprised 24 hours after his tweet.

To clarify what he meant, Musk tweeted the characters below as a follow-up tweet:

The Twitter chief had put the eradication of bot accounts from Twitter on his priority list as soon as he acquired the company in October.

Asked when the purging of bot accounts would begin, Musk said that it would be “no later than noon” on December 12.

Bot accounts are automated Twitter accounts that are programmed to create or interact with tweets with specific instructions on themes and messages.

Many bot accounts are harmless and beneficial to Twitter users, but some are set to push malicious contents. Musk believes some users of these bot accounts mask their identities and easily avoid responsibility.

A 2017 research paper from Indiana University and University of Southern California estimates bot accounts make up 15 percent of total active Twitter accounts. Twitter had said that the bot accounts were about 8.5% in 2014. Musk believes the numbers are higher today.

“These complex bots may be active on Twitter, and therefore present in our datasets, and may have been incorrectly labeled as humans, making even the 15% figure a conservative estimate,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

There are 237 million daily active users on Twitter, according to Statista. Fifteen percent of the daily active Twitter users is about 35 million accounts.

Deletion of social media accounts at such a scale won’t go unnoticed. Follower count will drop for most social media influencers. Twitter accounts that have been inactive for a long period of time may also be at risk of accidental deactivation.

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