Twitter Inc. signaled on Tuesday that it’s taking more steps to combat abuse and the number of automated accounts on its platform, following waves of criticism that it has been used as a tool to spread propaganda and harass people.

A company first will be asking new users from now on to confirm their email address or phone number when they sign up for an account, something that should help reduce the number of bad actors creating multiple accounts sometimes to spread a nefarious message.

Twitter added that it will work with the Trust & Safety Council and other nongovernmental organizations so people in high-risk environments who need anonymity do not unnecessarily get hurt by the move.

As for existing accounts, Twitter is currently in the process of auditing a large number of suspected spam accounts. Some of those, Twitter said, used an automatic signup. From now on, there will be enhanced security checks to ensure this happens less often or not at all.

Some of those spam accounts could have been part of your audience, says Twitter. “These accounts are primarily ‘follow spammers,’ who in many cases appear to have automatically or bulk followed verified or other high-profile accounts suggested to new accounts during our signup flow,” said the company. With the new crackdown, some users can expect to see their number of followers drop.

The machine learning algorithms Twitter is using in this fight against spam seems to be working, according to Twitter’s reported statistics. During May 2018, Twitter said, the algorithm “identified and challenged more than 9.9 million potentially spammy or automated accounts per week.”

That was up from 6.4 million in December and 3.2 million in September. This has led to a significant decrease in the number of reports Twitter receives regarding suspicious accounts.

The upshot: People are seeing less spam. It might even help avoid a rerun of Twitter being manipulated by such organizations as Russian propagandists. Accounts that are under suspicion will be rendered read-only and adorned with a red flag, and if the account holder passes a test after that, in a few hours the account will be fully restored.

The move follows a number of initiatives last year to curb abuse on the platform and purge extremist content. Earlier this year Twitter even made the move to ask experts for counsel and support as to how it might improve itself in order to be a better place for people to interact.

All this cleansing may have been the reason for Twitter’s rather good 2018. The company reported in April that it was finally making a profit and user growth was the healthiest since 2015.

Image: Twitter