Twitter is taking steps to remove bots after growing criticism. This week the company quietly deleted thousands of automated accounts. Shares of Twitter were down about 3 percent on Thursday. The Daily Beast's Technology Reporter Taylor Lorenz explains whether this move is a little too late for Twitter.
"It's great that they are addressing the bot problem. Of course, it would have been much better if they had addressed it earlier," says Lorenz. "I'm skeptical it will make a huge difference."
Lorenz interviewed several former Twitter engineers who said the company's bot protection technology was so bad that they only addressed it after the media backlash.
If you wanted to previously find an image that perfectly matched what you saw in your head online, you had to type in a wordy search inquiry and would get countless results back. Now, that mental snapshot can be crafted in seconds by artificial intelligence and sometimes it’s even better than you could imagine.
