Last month, Twitter announced quite a few new rules on how users and apps can make tweets automatic in a bid to bring down spam and bots that disseminate propaganda. According to the company, users that make use of several accounts can “amplify or inflate the prominence of certain tweets.” Information reaching us from our sources say that a lot of accounts that were known for mass-retweeting or for copying and stealing tweets from other users have been banned.
Our sources also reported that some accounts such as @girlposts, and @ginah, some of which were “with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers” broke the new spam policies of the company and have been suspended. One of our sources was directed to new rules that the company had made in a wider movement to combat span, which state that violators are at the risk of having their accounts suspended for a limited time only or for good.
In February, Twitter said that it would eliminate the ability for third-party platforms like Tweetdeck to like, retweet, or send out selfsame tweets from multiple accounts in order to reduce a practice called Tweetdecking. It was at the same time the rules were made that the company cracked down a large number of bots.
The new rules came in right after it was revealed that over 50,000 accounts that were linked to Russian-backed organisations scuppered almost 700,000 people to propaganda over the course of the 2016 US Presidential Election in January. During the period, the company stated that it was going to be working to prevent applications from controlling armies of bots. The limits are designed to prevent individuals from posting “substantially similar content” to multiple accounts, and then using those accounts to promote their profile and popularity by artificial means.
