In February 2018, Twitter announced new guidelines around the use of automation and multiple accounts. If you use automation (such as scheduling tweets to be posted later) or manage multiple Twitter accounts, it’s important to understand and follow these new guidelines. Read on for more on the changes and how Hootsuite is making changes in our platform to help customers comply.
As Twitter explained in the announcement on their blog, the changes are intended to keep Twitter safe and spam-free. “One of the most common spam violations we see is the use of multiple accounts and the Twitter developer platform to attempt to artificially amplify or inflate the prominence of certain Tweets. To be clear: Twitter prohibits any attempt to use automation for the purposes of posting or disseminating spam, and such behavior may result in enforcement action.”
The new rules target bad actors abusing social networks to create and spread spam and fake news, essentially by making it harder to create or control accounts to make it look like a particular point of view has more support than it actually does.
If you’re already following industry best practices for social media management (as outlined, for example, in our guide to Twitter marketing), the changes are unlikely to affect your business. However, it’s important to be aware of the new guidelines to make sure you stay within the guardrails.
What’s changing?
Twitter’s new guidelines prohibit the following actions:
- Posting the same or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts you control.
- Creating duplicate or substantially similar accounts, with or without the use of automation.
- Posting multiple updates (on a single account or across multiple accounts you control) to a trending or popular topic (for instance, through the use of a specific hashtag) with an intent to subvert or manipulate the topic, or to artificially inflate the prominence of a…
