Twitter, meanwhile, reserves the right to permanently suspend accounts for impersonating individuals, brands or organizations in a misleading or deceptive manner.

Facebook says such accounts are 'created with malicious intent to violate our policies.' What constitutes a fake account?Īccording to Facebook, each day the platform blocks millions of attempts to set up fake accounts. The social network deleted some 1.7 billion fraudulent accounts in the second quarter of 2021 alone. Facebook estimates that 5% of its worldwide monthly users are fakes. According to one Twitter staffer, however, each week the platform challenges between 8,5 and 10 million bots, with two-thirds of malicious accounts automatically removed. The precise number of fake Twitter accounts is unknown. It was easy to fall for the fake Putin account (pictured left) - luckily, the official one bears a blue verification badge Fortunately, by now most major social media platforms are aware of this threat. This allowed it to go undetected for so long.įake accounts of this kind are increasingly used as tools of information warfare. The now defunct imposter account mainly retweeted official Kremlin statements, instead of misinformation. Confusingly, Putin's official, verified English-language Twitter feed has a similar number of followers. Set up in November 2012, the fake account had amassed almost a million followers by November 2018, when it was finally suspended by Twitter for impersonating the Russian leader. They were not the only respected media organizations to make this mistake. It turns out that both media outlets were duped by a fake, English-language Twitter account impersonating Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2014, The Washington Post ran a story titled 'Irony alert: First tweet from Putin account congratulated Obama? ' Four years later, Business Insider published a piece about Russian President Putin following only 19 people on Twitter, one of whom has been dead for five years.

Facebook 5 differences online answers