Why is it so easy to create fake accounts on services like Twitter? If they really wanted to provide a service to humans, what is with making it so that a single group can create 88k fake accounts on a whim.
Which nobody (rightfully so) wants.
Albeit, it seems like there are loopholes: https://www.abacusnews.com/big-guns/gamers-say-they-can-chea...
The decision is much easier in authoritarian states, because authoritarians typically hate and fear honest domestic political dissidents even more than they do foreign information agents.
People who need anonymity for purposes such as expressing opinions that could get them in trouble with their government, religious community, abusive family, employer, school, etc., generally do not need complete anonymity. They just need to be anonymous from the adversarial group that would penalize them for their comments.
Such people will usually be able to have contacts that they can trust with proof that they are legitimate, and who are sufficiently outside the influence of the adversarial group that they can openly vouch for the comments from the anonymous person without fear of reprisal, and openly explain how they verified the legitimacy of the comment author.
Certain contacts would probably end up being used by multiple anonymous commenters. For example, Amnesty International might serve as a contact for people who want to write anonymously about their government's human rights violations.
People who need anonymity for criminal activity or for disinformation campaigns would have a harder time finding a contact to vouch for them that their targets would trust.
The market price of low-tier bulk-created Twitter accounts seems to be $160/1k accounts. That's not bad. It's in line with services like Linkedin ($175), Hotmail ($150), Yahoo ($120) and Facebook ($150). The only large provider that does significantly better is Google ($300).
20 cents a pop for a process that should take 10 seconds and should in theory be easy to automate and parallelize for anyone with even basic programming skills? If it were actually easy, that'd be a goldmine.
That Twitter does an equivalent job of policing bulk account creation as their peers just means that it is also just as easy to create accounts at Twitter's peers.
why?
"We want Twitter to be a place where people can make human connections, find reliable information, and express themselves freely and safely."
I don't see how bulk-created accounts are consistent with that 'mission' statement. What kind of 'human connection' might result from a bulk account someone paid Twitter to create? How 'reliable' might info from a bulk account be? Why else would someone create a bulk account, except to manipulate people?
Appears they're blind to their own hypocrisy? Further on, at the top of their manipulations list they mention "commercially-motivated spam, that typically aims to drive traffic or attention from a conversation on Twitter to ..."
Yeah. Uh, the Twitter feed contains a constant gush of paid-for spam that is intended to do exactly that.
Spammers sell accounts in bulk that they have illicitly created or gained access to. Measuring how much those "bulk accounts" cost relative to accounts on other similarly desirable platforms is an effective way to measure how effective a platform is at rooting out spammers and preventing fake & bulk-purchased accounts.
The statement about "commercially-motivated spam, that typically aims to drive traffic or attention from a conversation on Twitter to ..." applies perfectly to all of the paid-for advertising. Ever have a problem on Twitter finding your threads because of the 'commercially-motivated spam' of paid-for ads thickly laid on? Ever miss seeing a message someone left?
The ads obviously and continuously break up the conversation between human beings to encourage them to visit promotional sites. The difference between paid and unpaid spam is an economical one for Twitter; for the user its a deluge of distractions.
You could argue that the paid-for commercial advertising is 'saner' or 'nicer' or 'less damaging' than the agenda-pushing bulk accounts. But in the end, both are 'manipulating the platform'. 'Making human connections' has become an ancillary goal.
What if they're not even fake accounts, but some big group (like a country) just organizes its members to post particular things? Should those users be banned? Or a business pays people to promote their products (the business model of influencers)? What if that organizing isn't particularly formal but is gently guided in one direction in the form of propaganda or advertising (nationalists and fans)? Now do we have to ban all users from some country because they've been too brainwashed by their local propaganda to be trusted as acting like independent human beings? Ban all Christians? They seem to keep repeating the same false information like robots, and somebody might get fooled into believing it.
A: signal:noise ratio gets worse when there are tons of noisy bots spamming everywhere.
Q: "that's a ridiculous way to form beliefs"
A: Yeah, but that IS how the (vast?) majority of society changes their beliefs so it does matter.
Q: all your other implied questions
A: it's against the ToS. People who don't like that fact are SoL.