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To be fair, it also EXPLICITLY states:

> Twitter said about 75 percent of the blocked accounts this year were spotted before a single tweet was sent

So the impact to average users is probably not very substantial.

One of those was probably mine. I was banned within five minutes of signing up, I'm guessing because I was using semi-public wifi and didn't provide a phone number (although the signup form says it's optional.) The stated reason was for "bot-like activity".

How do they know the account was from an actual terrorist or from a Viagra salesbot if it never made a post?

I get spam follows from bots with no posts all the time. It's generally pretty easy to tell who will turn out to be a real person or not — they'll have random, super botty names (Svetlana Nakamoto with the handle jonesdevin), or their profile pics will be stock art or porn stars, or something like that.

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