It seems like Twitter is in the process of testing a Night Mode for its desktop website. 9to5Google got the new feature and notes that it can be turned on via a toggle. This is located in the menu that drops down when one clicks on their profile image. Night Mode does not change the way Twitter works in anyway, and is purely cosmetic. The new darker theme is aimed at making the website easier to read at night, or in dark environments. It is not yet known when the company will start rolling out the feature to all its users. Twitter launched Night Mode on its mobile app almost a year ago and offers the same basic functionality.
Last month, it was reported that Twitter was facing a fresh botnet attack. The the micro blogging platform was spammed by over 90,000 sex bots that generated over 8.5 million posts that link to online romance, dating and porn websites. The attack was first noted by ZeroFOX that named it Siren. The problem of bots on the website isn’t new. A research undertaken by University College London earlier this year revealed that there were nearly 350,000 fake accounts on Twitter.
When we met up with Twitter’s Senior Director of Business Development, Michael Fisher and Arvind Gujral, Senior Director of Business Development, Twitter (APAC) last year, they collectively dismissed the problem of bots. Calling its a “fancy four letter word.” Upon probing the matter further, the company responded by saying that it was “tackling that at many levels. Sometimes algorithmically, sometimes manually, we are working towards making it more streamlined. It’s a complex problem and there’s no easy solution. It’s an AI problem and we are working on it.” Hopefully the company will solve the problem of bots on its platform soon.