[gwittel]

The conversation we should be having is where are we now, and what is good enough?

Having worked in large scale anti-abuse detection for most of my career (~18 years), the points mentioned line up in the Twitter thread align with my experience. Scaling in this area is hard. 99% efficacy sounds great, until you say 99% out of millions/billions. The amount of FNs ('bad' or unwanted things) is still substantial enough for users to notice. Taking a 229m active user count [1], 99% fake account detection efficacy sets you at 2.2m fake accounts. Looking into tweets/day you've similarly large numbers if you want to look at content detection.

Twitter can most likely do better given the right resources, people, and leadership support (Facebook has similar problems aligning all 3 of those). Once they have those, the open question is how much better they can get. Each incremental increase in efficacy gets more expensive.

To top it off, as detection gets better, you think those abusing Twitter will sit still? Of course not, they'll change tactics (content, usage of hacked accounts, etc.).

[1] Twitter 10-Q 2022-Q1 - https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/0...