Twitter starts suspending accounts for infamous tweetdecking

Social Media giant, Twitter is famous for a phenomenon it calls ‘tweetdecking’. It is basically mass-retweeting by these accounts because someone offer to pay for it. This brings attention to things that are promoted without saying promoted. This is harmful for the community as well as the company. Twitter has finally started suspending several accounts known in the tweetdecking community.

What was the result?

According to a report by Buzzfeed, several accounts which include @Dory, @GirlPosts, @SoDamnTrue, Girl Code/@reiatabie, Common White Girl/@commonwhitegiri, @teenagernotes, @finah, @holyfag, and @memeprovider were affected. The company says there will be more bans in the future. Many of the suspended accounts had as many as millions of followers. Most of these accounts had several thousand subscribers.

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This is due to their practice of teaming up in exclusive groups. These groups then mass-retweet one another’s and paying customer's tweets. This forces those tweets containing something into forced virality. This is why its harmful for the community. Also, this way these people avoid paying Twitter for promoted Tweets and this harms the company. Tweetdecking a violation of Twitter’s spam policy. If you read Twitter's terms of service, it says “selling, purchase, or attempts to artificially inflate account interactions are illegal activity". Still, accounts like this exist.

Is it Legal by Twitter Terms of Service?

According to Twitter’s rules of service, violating this policy will result in immediate suspension, without any consideration. (As is creating a new account to evade a permanent suspension.) According to a study, by three Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scholars found the topics which spread faster than other. According to it, fake news on politics travel farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth on Twitter. This is probably because humans, not robots, are most likely to retweet it.