
Automation and the Use of Multiple Accounts - jacquesm
https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tips/2018/automation-and-the-use-of-multiple-accounts.html
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mattferderer
Is it just me or did Twitter just remove a large honey pot for identifying
fake accounts?

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.

~~~
eXpl0it3r
Maybe, but instead they added measurements that the event itself shouldn't
occur at all in the first place. Since tweets are very short-lived I feel it's
more important to proactively prevent spam rather than reactive.

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.

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eecc
Curious if enforcement is going to also thrash legitimate human accounts that
have been - underhandedly - oauth’d authorized to be remotely controlled by a
third party.

I hope Twitter introduces a screen informing who and what caused suspensions
or bans

~~~
ameliaquining
Wouldn't Twitter be able to see who access was delegated to? It sounds like
they'd just ban the app rather than all its users.

~~~
pavel_lishin
The idea is to find and kill bot _accounts_ , not bot-control aps.

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tw1010
> _Posting multiple updates [...] to a trending or popular topic [...] with an
> intent to subvert or manipulate the topic [...] is never allowed._

Good thing _intent_ is super easy to infer without ambiguity.

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mmikeff
Does this mean that tools like
[https://www.thunderclap.it/](https://www.thunderclap.it/) are in for a hard
time?

~~~
audiolion
when I read this i thought of thunderclap too, wonder how much they are
affected

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FrederikET
Nice to see that they actually do something. I have never heard Facebook
publish anything about what they do...

~~~
threeseed
Well bookmark the following and be prepared. Because Facebook posts a lot
about what they do.

[https://newsroom.fb.com](https://newsroom.fb.com)

[https://code.facebook.com](https://code.facebook.com)

------
f055
Doesn’t this imply the end of any usefulness of twitter for business and
marketing purposes? Big companies have multiple accounts and no one is
tweeting directly, it all goes through some central tool in marketing dept.
Weird move, twitter.

~~~
comex
No?

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.

~~~
bringtheaction
Multinational corporations often have different accounts for different
regions. Corporations that operate in multiple sectors often have different
accounts for different sectors.

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.

~~~
ascagnel_
I'd imagine that Twitter would gladly offer a paid program for companies that
wish to use the service in that way.

------
mozumder
What's the use case for Twitter to allow outside write API access?

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?

~~~
threeseed
Just a few use cases. I suspect there are quite a lot:

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.

~~~
mozumder
Those all are automated spam, and doesn't really facilitate discussion. They
just increase noise on the platform.

Edit: Reminder that Twitter filters out posts that don't receive much
interaction.

~~~
vidarh
Pretty much none of what I use Twitter for is discussion. You're assuming
everyone uses Twitter for a very specific, limited purpose.

