Twitter is banning 1m accounts a day to keep your timeline clean

Twitter is getting serious about fake and abusive accounts on the network – as in really serious. Reports say the powers-that-be on the platform have suspended some 70 million accounts over the course of May and June, which works out to more than a million a day, and the purge is apparently still ongoing.

That's according to a report from The Washington Post, which says Twitter has been stung by recent criticism and is taking stronger action than ever before. The downside is, of course, that it's going to have to report lower user numbers as well.

The clean-up is apparently focusing on automated and spammy accounts, the sort that are run by software or designed to funnel you through to affiliate links that can make a few pennies for their owners. If you start seeing less junk in the feed when you open up the Twitter app, now you know why.

Fight the spam

Gizmodo reports that Twitter is also cracking down to stop spam accounts from being set up in the first place – it says it's now blocking more than 50,000 dodgy accounts a day from ever being created.

Twitter itself says around 5% of accounts are spam accounts, and up to 9% of accounts are bots – some of which serve useful and legitimate purposes of course. Third-party analysts reckon those numbers could be a lot higher, which means the action being taken now will really hit the social network's user numbers.

At the last count, Twitter reported having 336 million active users who log into the platform at least once a month. It remains to be seen just how much the spambot crackdown is going to affect those numbers, but it should improve the experience for the rest of us.