LONDON – Continuing its tirade against the “tweetdeckers”, Twitter hassuspended several popular accounts known for stealing tweets ormass-retweeting tweets into manufactured virality.
According to Buzzfeedlink>,accounts, including @Dory, @GirlPosts, @SoDamnTrue, Girl Code/@reiatabie,Common White Girl/@commonwhitegiri, @teenagernotes, @finah, @holyfag, and@memeprovider were among the handles that were swept in the purge.
Several of these accounts were very popular with hundreds of thousands oreven millions of followers.
In addition to stealing people’s tweets without credit, some of theseaccounts are known as “tweetdeckers” due to their practice of teaming up inexclusive Tweetdeck groups and mass-retweeting one another’s – and payingcustomers’ – tweets into forced virality, the report said.
Tweetdecking is an explicit violation of Twitter’s spam policy, which doesnot allow users to “sell, purchase, or attempt to artificially inflateaccount interactions”.
According to Twitter’s rules, violating this policy is grounds forpermanent suspension. (As is creating a new account to evade a permanentsuspension.)
Last week, a study led by three Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)scholars found that false news on politics travels farther, faster, deeperand more broadly than the truth on Twitter because humans, not robots, aremore likely to spread it.