Artificial Intelligence in Practice

28Twitter: Using Artificial Intelligence To Fight Fake News And Spambots

There are over 330 million Twitter users using the social media platform to send hundreds of millions of tweets every day.¹

People all around the world love the service for the ease it brings to staying in touch with friends, their favorite celebrities and keeping up to date with the news.

Unfortunately, due to the huge number of people using the service and its essentially anonymous nature, sometimes the news being pumped out 24/7 is fake. And sometimes the other people using the service may not have your best interests at heart.

One of the ways the social media giant uses artificial intelligence (AI) is to try to stay on top of the enormous challenge of keeping its users safe from those using it to spread harmful information.

What Problem Is Artificial Intelligence Helping To Solve?

The age of social media has given everyone a voice. And, as always, some people choose to use theirs to spread lies and misinformation.

Whether it's for political reasons or greed, since its birth social media has been a magnet for all types of scammers and propagandists, up to and including accusations of state-level electoral interference.²

While trolls targeting foreign elections may have made the headlines this year, more personal scamming is also rampant and often goes under the radar. A Gizmodo investigation found that fraudsters routinely steal photographs from innocent third parties to create fake accounts.³