← Back to context

Comment by seesawtron

5 years ago

I would imagine that accounts of "important" people are handled personally rather than by automated algorithm. As Jack Dorsey points out in this[0] Joe Rogan podcast, the reported tweets by public or algorithm are manually checked at some point.

Approx. 4000 employees of Twitter all around the world. Every day 100k (edit: 100M) tweets are sent. The reports of tweets that violate the platform policy are (reported by public) enter a queue. These are then inspected by personnel hired by Twitter (number varies proportionally to the scale reports in the queue).

The personnel then go through a series of steps to take an action such as making you verify again, delete those tweets, suspending the account, or in the last resort ban the user permanently.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

> Every day 100k tweets are sent

When I worked there we handled about ~6k tweets/sec all day every day. (~500,000,000 tweets/day)

  • There are 145M daily active users on Tweeter. So that’s approx 3 tweets per user. Sounds reasonable.

  • What database did you use?

    • It was just* MySQL for a lot longer than you might imagine. They were switching over to Manhattan (in-house DB, similar to FB's Cassandra) when I left, dunno the current state of affairs.

      * highly customized and sharded, required team of senior MySQL DBAs to maintain, but still just MySQL.

Only 100k/day? That sounds quite low.