Twitter kills a slew of popular accounts in ‘tweetdecking’ purge

Twitter, after updating its automated tweeting rules in February, has taken a stance on forced memes, automated mass tweeting and accounts that “inflate the prominence of certain tweets.”

On Friday, the company suspended a number of popular accounts implicit in the above, including the likes of @dory, @girlposts and @ginah. The former had over two-million followers.

According to Buzzfeed, a number of these accounts were implicit with a practice known as “tweetdecking”. Named after the Twitter dashboard app, it’s a method to artificially bloat the popularity of a particular tweet by posting them over a number of accounts.

This is seemingly no longer appropriate, account to Twitter’s terms of service.

@dory, @girlposts and @ginah were just three of many Twitter accounts suspended in the company’s action against spam tweeting

“The use of any form of automation (including scheduling) to post identical or substantially similar content, or to perform actions such as Likes or Retweets, across many accounts that have authorized your app (whether or not you created or directly control those accounts) is not permitted,” Twitter’s Yoel Roth explained in a February update.

And, more acutely: “Users of TweetDeck will no longer be able to select multiple accounts through which to perform an action such as Tweeting, Retweeting, liking, or following.”

The company had also made changes to Tweetdeck and its API last month in a bid to ” limit the ability of users to perform coordinated actions across multiple accounts.”

It’s not clear whether Twitter will be re-enabling access to these accounts, nor if this purge will clear Twitter of its mass of spam. But at least it’s a start.

H/T: Buzzfeed

Feature image: Memeburn