Part of a powerful botnet of 1212 accounts
Twitter said it permanently suspended a "small number" of fake accounts it accidentally verified just weeks after it relaunched its public verification program, the Daily Dot reports. The fatal error arose after data scientist Conspirador Norteño discovered six verified accounts that were recently created on June 16. None of them posted a single tweet, and two used what appeared to be stored profile pictures.
"We erroneously accepted verification requests for a small number of non-original (fake) accounts," Twitter told the Daily Dot in a statement. “We have now permanently suspended the accounts in question, and removed their verification badge, under our Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy.”
The incident indicates that Twitter's verification process is having problems, and it's not picking up on the types of non-genuine accounts that obviously shouldn't deserve the platform's coveted blue badge. Twitter recently relaunched public verification apps with a revamped set of eligibility criteria based on the idea that an account must be "authentic, premium, and active" to be worthy of verification. It is clear that the accounts that were identified were not among these accounts.
As Norteño explains in a Twitter thread, the six accounts had 976 suspicious followers in common — all created between June 19 and June 20 — and a significant number of them were using AI-generated profile pictures. In total, Norteño says they were part of a bot network consisting of at least 1,212 accounts.
As of this writing, Twitter has suspended five out of six verified accounts, while a sixth appears to have deactivated its profile. Nortino says the "majority" of the support bots has also been removed. But the incident raises questions about how the accounts were able to verify them in the first place, and why Twitter's operations didn't flag them before they were discovered by a third-party researcher.
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