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).
why?
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.
"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.