Automation and the Use of Multiple Accounts
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
For example, a recent anti Net Neutrality marketing push was allegedly done by AT&T paying a company who owned a large amount of accounts to tweet members of US Congress the exact same message at roughly the same time. I can't think of an easier way for Twitter to round up a ton of potential fake accounts than watching for these type of events.
I'm not saying that if 100 accounts all post the same thing at the same time, they're all fake accounts. I'm just saying those 100 accounts are worth looking into with other automated checks.
Besides that, while it's quite easy to "detect" some spam wave as a human within a given context, implementing such a detection in an automated manner is a lot harder, because a machine doesn't have intuition and have the context required to notice it.
I hope Twitter introduces a screen informing who and what caused suspensions or bans
Good thing intent is super easy to infer without ambiguity.
First of all, big companies don't usually have multiple Twitter accounts; rather, all their representatives communicate from a single account.
Second of all, even if a company did want to use a multitude of Twitter accounts for some reason, the ban is on posting the same content to multiple accounts, aka spam. Not simply having multiple accounts available to choose from in the same interface.
Some are both multinational and cover several sectors, for example Yamaha.
Here are just a few Yamaha twitter accounts: @YamahaMusicEU, @YamahaMusicUSA, @YamahaUK, @YamahaAV, @YamahaMotorEU, @YamahaMotorUSA, @YamahaMotoGP.
When a company makes a product they may or may not wish to make the same announcement on the accounts for that vertical across different regions. Most often the really big ones will probably make different announcements due to both differences in desired wording and in launch dates, but still the point stands that they might sometimes wish to post the same news.
Almost all top tech companies have multiple @accounts, even Twitter does! I've seen multiple times how these companies post same announcements on multiple accounts. Even Twitter sometimes does that, for example when announcing something important in relation to security or policy, they post the same thing on the dedicated channel and their main channel.
Moreover, there are tons of tools build around Twitter API, like consumer ones: buffer, hootsuite and several other big enterprise tools that enable exactly that - connecting multiple accounts and cross-posting/scheduling the same tweet across all channels (as usually these tools also connect to facebook, linkedin and g+).
So, I still don't understand Twitter's move here, they are effectively declaring most of their business use cases to be outside of the guidelines. I'm surprised.
If twitter banned all API write access, what would be the problem?
The vast majority of people would still use Twitter via the app or their website, and it would obviously solve a lot of spam problem. But do we really need automated emergency alerts that don't filter through a human?
The post that started this thread was about thought experiment of Twitter killing off their API. So that third party clients wouldn't work is a given. And since they wouldn't work, there's no reason why Twitter couldn't show a captcha many more times after signup.
1) Allowing a delay between creation and posting e.g. Buffer.
2) Posting updates to Twitter whenever CMS content changes e.g. Wordpress.
3) Large companies who need tools that work across all social media sites e.g. Hootsuite.
4) RSS -> Twitter.
The NYTimes automating tweeting a link to an article after its published provides value. Yet that same functionality allows spammers to tweet links to their spam automatically as well.
Likewise with scheduling, etc.
Anecdotally, before 2010 (when scheduling tweets became popular) I remember Twitter being much more active and discussion oriented, hence I paid more attention to my feed. Now i only use Twitter to search for specific things (ie is AWS down)
Edit: Reminder that Twitter filters out posts that don't receive much interaction.
Much of the platform is dedicated to users wanting to follow products, brands, services etc. For them the services I listed are a critical necessity. You can argue all of it is spam but then by that definition so is most of the web.