Twitter confesses it verified numerous fake accounts

The blunder came to light after data scientist revealed six verified accounts which had been created recently on June 16th.

None of the accounts had posted a single tweet, and two used what appeared to be stock photographs for profile pictures.

“We mistakenly approved the verification applications of a small number of inauthentic (fake) accounts,” Twitter told a news outlet in a statement.

“We have now permanently suspended the accounts in question, and removed their verified badge, under our platform manipulation and spam policy.”

The incident suggests that Twitter’s verification process is having problems, and not catching the kinds of obviously inauthentic accounts that shouldn’t be worthy of the platform’s coveted blue badge.

Twitter recently relaunched public verification applications with a revamped set of eligibility criteria based around the idea that an account should be “authentic, notable, and active” to be worthy of verification.

Clearly, the accounts identified were none of these.

Meet @aykacmis, @degismece, @anlamislar, @aykacti, @kayitlii, and @donmedim, a sextet of blue-check verified Twitter accounts created on June 16th, 2021. None has yet tweeted and all have roughly 1000 followers (and mostly the *same* followers).

cc: @ZellaQuixote pic.twitter.com/V82Wtu0SNr

— Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) July 12, 2021

Among the six accounts had 976 suspicious followers in common — all created between June 19th and June 20th — and large numbers of these were using AI-generated profile pictures.

In total, they were part of a botnet consisting of at least 1,212 accounts.

These six newly-created verified accounts have 977 followers in common. One is @verified (which follows all blue-check verified accounts). The other 976 were all created on June 19th or June 20th, 2021, and all follow the same 190 accounts. #Astroturf pic.twitter.com/N6kkh2DBZ3

— Conspirador Norteño (@conspirator0) July 12, 2021

Twitter has already suspended five out of the six verified accounts, while the sixth appears to have deactivated its profile.

The “majority” of the supporting botnet has also been taken down.

The recent incident raised questions about how the accounts were able to get verified in the first place, and why Twitter’s courses didn’t flag them before they were discovered by a third-party researcher.