New York, Apr 18 (IANS): Twitter quietly released support for third-party two-factor authentication applications enabling the twitterati to now use these apps to protect their accounts, a media report said.

A Twitter developer said that this feature had been live since "late last year or early this year", tech website Android Police reported on Monday.

This feature allows Twitter users to use third-party apps, such as Google Authenticator or LastPass Authenticator, to protect their accounts.

To turn this feature on, users can go to the Settings menu on Twitter's website, then go to Account, and look for "Login verification" under the Security menu.

Twitter already has its own two-factor authentication feature, and new users will need to activate this system before being allowed to set up a third-party authenticator app.

Once Twitter's system is activated, users can click the button reading "Setup a code generator app" to activate the third-party app of their choice.

In January this year, computer scientists have found massive collections of fake accounts on the micro-blogging site and suggested that one person or a group is managing these accounts.

According to a BBC report, the largest network that was found have tied together more than 350,000 accounts and further work suggested that others might be even bigger.

The networks were uncovered accidentally when some researchers were probing Twitter to see how people use it.

Some of the accounts were used to fake follower numbers, send spam and boost interest in trending topics.

As of the third quarter of 2016, the micro-blogging service averaged at 317 million monthly active users.