What you need to know about Twitter’s new automation rules

Twitter recently announced that they’re cracking down on automation and the use of multiple accounts to share the same message. They said in a statement, ‘Twitter prohibits any attempt to use automation for the purposes of posting or disseminating spam, and such behaviour may result in enforcement action.’

As part of these efforts to tackle spam, they are making changes to TweetDeck and the Twitter API, which will limit the ability of users to perform coordinated actions across multiple accounts. Only certain accounts are exempt from these rules – news and weather accounts, for example.

So what does this mean for you?

Essentially, Twitter will potentially block your account if you:

• • Post the same message (or even a very similar message) more than once – even if it’s scheduled a week or a month later
  • Post the same message across multiple accounts that you manage

If you’re on Lightful, we’ve got you covered

If you use Lightful to plan, schedule and post your content then you don’t need to worry about these changes as we’ve updated the platform to reflect them.

If you try to post the same content, you’ll get this red error message:

If you try to post the same message across more than one account, you’ll get the following yellow error message:

Essentially, if you’re using Lightful to manage your social media then you won’t be affected by these changes.

This is a good thing

We welcome these changes by Twitter because it means they really are taking spam and bots seriously. Hopefully, these changes will lead to better quality content and less fake accounts creating even more noise in an already noisy world.

To read the full statement, visit the Twitter Developer Blog.