Twitter Automation Rules for 2018

During the 2016 presidential race, Russian government-linked organizations flooded Twitter with bots and spam in order to distribute propaganda and ultimately influence voter outcomes.

After a thorough internal investigation, Twitter has finally decided to crack down on platform abuse and the presence of misinformation plaguing its network. Last month, it announced a new Automation Policy, concerning the use of excessive automation and spamming with multiple accounts.

Moreover, Twitter established an internal Information Quality team, which not only led the company’s research on spam and bot activities but is now responsible for monitoring and assuring data quality.

In summary, the new regulations prohibit Twitter users from:

• Posting duplicative or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions across multiple accounts you control, or 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 (e.g. through the use of a specific hashtag) with an intention to subvert or manipulate the topic, or to artificially inflate the prominence of a hashtag or topic.

In light of these regulations, any third-party app, including Oktopost, is prohibited from allowing users to simultaneously publish identical (or near-identical) tweets to multiple accounts, and operate bulk actions such as following or retweeting. These regulations have come into effect on March 23.

In order to comply with these regulations and protect our users from being sanctioned, Oktopost has deployed the following changes:

• The Post Console no longer allows users to post to multiple Twitter profiles or send the same tweet across multiple time periods.
• The Streams no longer allows users to perform bulk following or retweeting.
• The Autoposter no longer allows the selection of multiple Twitter profiles within the same instance.

While you can still manage multiple Twitter profiles in one Oktopost account, simultaneous actions are no longer available. We understand that these changes might be disruptive to your social media activities, we believe that they will vastly improve information quality.

This is a valuable and long overdue upgrade to the platform, but it also means B2B marketers may have to adjust some of their long-loved business practices. If you’re trying to understand how the new Automation Policy affects your use of Twitter, check out our article with 5 best-practices to follow.