[beager]

I’ve worked at a global-scale platform for user-generated content doing anti-abuse and anti-spam tooling. In my experience those researchers do exist in-house and there was an imperative to remove abusive and spammy accounts.

The difference in my perception is that the presence of the bots and bad actors on Twitter that come to the attention of reporting like this increases engagement and views, and thus top line revenue.

This isn’t saying “bots count as views, so we get more ad dollars”. It’s that bots and bad actors promote topics and conversations that bring more real users to the platform, and increase the session duration for new and existing users.

I would imagine that Twitter sees spam bots and purveyors of illegal content as unwelcome and probably has an engineering team that dispatches those accounts quickly. But whether deliberately or unconsciously, they probably don’t apply the same rigor to accounts that break the TOS but manage to drive the top line up.

I’d love to hear from an engineer from Twitter who works in this space.