Twitter has announced new limitations on how users and apps can automate tweets on its platform. The social media giant says it aims to combat spam and political propaganda bots.
Going forward, developers will be banned from using any system that simultaneously posts “identical or substantially similar” tweets from multiple accounts simultaneously. Likewise, actions such as liking, retweeting or following across multiple accounts at once is also prohibited.
Twitter says it will remove these options from its own TweetDeck app, while third-party developers must do the same by March 23rd.
In general, “bulk, aggressive, or very high-volume automated retweeting” is not allowed, regardless of whether these actions are carried out at once or scheduled across longer periods of time. Alerts can be cross-posted from other services (such as RSS readers), but only to a single account.
Twitter says these rules won’t apply to “weather, emergency, or other public service announcements of broad community interest.”
According to Twitter, the new rules are “an important step in ensuring we stay ahead of malicious activity targeting the crucial conversations taking place on Twitter — including elections in the United States and around the world.”
A full breakdown of the changes can be found in the Twitter Rules and Automation Rules.
Source: Twitter
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