Twitter Bans Mass Tweeting & Blocks Duplicate Accounts; Conservatives Outraged!

Shortly after reporting its first-ever profit, Twitter has started to clean up its platform and is making changes to its Tweetdeck in an effort to fight spam. Twitter has banned bulked tweeting and deleted multiple duplicate accounts, a possible major step towards eradication of the practice of mass tweeting.

The social messaging platform has banned mass tweeting, and the latest move is intended to rid the service of the spam-spewing automated accounts and to ensure Twitter is a safe place with no malicious activity targeting the crucial conversations taking place.

Twitter Bans Mass Tweeting

Several Tweetdeck users have made significant profits from selling retweets in the past. It has become an open business now. From now on, Tweetdeck users will no longer be able to select multiple accounts to retweet. This will restrict the Tweetdeck groups which automatically mass-retweet each others’ tweets to manufacture fake virality.

Twitter has banned mass tweeting and bulk retweets, as one of the most common spam violations on the platform is the use of multiple accounts to artificially amplify or inflate the prominence of certain tweets.

The new changes are an effort to eliminate spam from Twitter. The move will put a ban on posting duplicative or substantially similar content, replies or mentions on Twitter over multiple accounts. Bulk, aggressive or any sort of high-volume automated retweeting is now banned, along with access to multiple accounts to perform similar automated actions like following people.

Blocks Duplicate Accounts

The crackdown is an effort to churn out the automated and fake accounts, a move which has rankled some of the conservative personalities. Twitter purged thousands of bot accounts on its platform, after which several users reported losing thousands of followers. The conservatives are calling it #TwitterLockout and #TwitterPurge.

The move isn’t the first time Twitter has taken an action against fake users. In the past, the company has deleted a large number of suspicious accounts on a number of occasions. Users have criticized Twitter for having a “double standard” in how it treats its conservative users.

Twitter Hotpotch – The Political Conspiracy

Despite conspiracy theories that quickly gained traction on Twitter, the social media company denied any political bias. Later, Twitter said in an emailed statement, that the tools are apolitical. The move is a part of the ongoing exercise in safety to eradicate suspicious accounts and behaviour which indicate automated activity or violations of any policies around having multiple accounts, or abuse.

Last month the company said the number of Russia-linked accounts on Twitter firing off tweets which were evidently aimed at the US election in 2016 was more widespread than initially determined. Many have described the Russia link as a bot and disinformation operation which sought to sow divisions in the American society using social media.

The biggest complaint appears to be that many of the affected users are politically conservative, and it seems that the San Francisco based social media site is censoring or otherwise going after a certain group in particular.

Twitter Bans Mass Tweeting – Now What?

Twitter is asking a suspicious user to confirm a phone number so that the company can make sure that a human is running the account, and not a bot. This is the major reason why several users may be experiencing suspensions or lockouts.

The account without a phone number will remain locked until a phone number is confirmed. Twitter hasn’t specified how many accounts have been flagged as a result of this latest move. It has been gradually cracking down on the bot accounts over the past several months.