How Twitter Secretly Benefits From Bots and Fake Accounts

Twitter may have a fake accounts scandal on its hands. And it’s remarkably similar to the scandal that rocked Wells Fargo last year.

Leslie Miley, a former engineering manager at Twitter, described to Bloomberg on Friday how he uncovered a trove of spam accounts with IP addresses from Russia and Ukraine in 2015. He recommended deletion, but Twitter’s “growth team” controlled all removals of accounts. And they declined to purge them. “They were more concerned with growth numbers than fake and compromised accounts,” Miley told Bloomberg.

The only difference between this and the Wells Fargo scandal is the identity of who created the accounts.