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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

Would you say https://twitter.com/daringfireball or https://twitter.com/thetalkshow are spam? Should they be suspended too?

The account did not violate Twitter rules in any way. It wasn't sending replies. It wasn't retweeting other accounts. It wasn't liking other accounts. It wasn't interacting with other accounts in any way. Should there be no accounts on Twitter that have a list of episodes of a program?

People follow these accounts because they want to be notified of new episodes. It's not spam, it's a service.

I tweet links to my blog posts on my Twitter account. Should I be suspended? What's wrong with external links?

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The account in question posted 76 tweets in under 30 mins.

Have you posted with this level of frequency, from different IPs? You may not need to worry if you have not.

> Have you posted with this level of frequency, from different IPs?

I don't know, maybe? I tend to tweet along with Apple keynotes, for example.

My IP changes whenever I switch from wifi to cellular.

In the thread, Ben alluded to automated, possibly distributed activity:

> For the record, this is a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world.

It seems obvious that the tweets were automated -- during some periods, it tweeted every ~10 seconds. If it were switching IPs at that same rate, especially if the IPs were in known AWS/Azure/etc ranges, then it's obviously not going to be authentic human activity.

In your personal situation, even if you had IP changes between every tweet -- I assume your account has some tenure, and is more than just a few days old? Twitter keeps track of all the IPs you've ever logged in from, and for older known accounts, there's probably more tolerance for weird activity (e.g. bouncing between VPNs) than a days-old account that has done nothing but suspicious spam.

> there's probably more tolerance for weird activity

Well, my Twitter account has been suspended at least 4 times for dumb reasons or no apparent reason at all.

> nothing but suspicious spam

It was not spam. Tweeting is not spam. Tweeting a lot is not even spam. Unsolicited replies, for example, can be spam. Ben's account did not interact with anyone. There was no unsolicited interaction whatsoever.

Also, there was no violation of Twitter rules.

Twitter has an "automation rules" [0] page which does indeed affirm that users are allowed to post "automated Tweets based on sources of outside information, such as an RSS feed, weather data, etc". But you're right, "spammy" isn't the right word since on the automation rules page and elsewhere, spam is generally understood by Twitter to be unsolicited interaction.

But the point is moot for now since Ben (AFAIK) hasn't posted any more details about the suspension note. IIRC, the suspension email is supposed to list the alleged violations, and I don't think Ben has tweeted a screenshot of that email. [1]

[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-autom...

[1] https://twitter.com/hollandcourtney/status/11255719071877242...

daringfireball has 30 tweets in the last 10 days. It's also a 15 year old account with 100k followers. It seems unlikely that any remotely competent spam detection algorithm or human review process would suspect it of being spam.

This is missing the point, which is "The account did not violate Twitter rules in any way."

If Gruber's accounts are not spam, then Thompson's account is not spam either. The age of the account and other statistics are irrelevant, because the same rules ought to apply to everyone.

I think it ought to be uncontroversial that an account shouldn't be suspended if it hasn't violated the rules, but somehow many people in this thread are defending the punishment of the innocent.

There's actually no rule against bots on Twitter. In fact there are some accounts now explicitly labeled "Automated". The goal ought to be not "detecting bots" but rather "detecting rule violations".

I'm not all that concerned with what Twitter's rules supposedly are. If the only complaint here is that Twitter should be more clear about their rules and/or more consistent in enforcing them, then sure, I can agree with that (although there are obvious reasons why you shouldn't be completely clear about what your exact thresholds are for spam detection).

I'm just talking about what I think looks clearly like spam, and what I think reasonable spam policies would look like. That whole Twitter thread of accusations has now been deleted, so I'm not necessarily addressing the exact text of it. I'm just saying that one of those posting patterns looks very clearly like spam and the other very clearly does not appear to be spam.

> I'm just saying that one of those posting patterns looks very clearly like spam and the other very clearly does not appear to be spam.

I disagree. Tweeting links without interacting in any way with other accounts is to me clearly not spam.

It’s all about age of the account, number of followers, and rate and origin of the automated tweets. Perhaps a way to think about it is to ask, if there was a new account created just to have a bot spam out links at a high rate, how would it look different than this account?

> rate and origin of the automated tweets

There were no automated tweets. https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583163548708241410 "Account was not scripted. Everything was posted by a human"

> if there was a new account created just to have a bot spam out links at a high rate, how would it look different than this account?

I think we differ on the definition of "spam".

Tweeting links on your own profile is not spam. Tweeting links in replies to other users can be spam. Ben's account was not replying at all, just tweeting in its own profile. A Twitter user would generally only see those tweets if they followed Ben's account. The was no unsolicited pushing.

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