Twitter bars strategy used by ‘bots’ to widespread fake stories
Twitter Inc. said on Wednesday it would no longer concede people to post identical messages from mixed accounts, enormous down on a tactic that Russian agents and others have allegedly used to make tweets or topics go viral.
The San Francisco-based amicable network also pronounced it would not concede people to use program to concurrently perform other actions such as fondness or retweeting from mixed accounts.
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@TwitterAPI
Twitter, famous for freewheeling discussions in short messages, is underneath vigour from users and Western governments to branch a widespread of feign news and unfamiliar propaganda, often done with a assistance of programmed accounts famous as bots.
Twitter bots disseminated promotion before a 2016 U.S. election and have continued to irritate U.S. politics under cover of anonymity, educational researchers and U.S. authorities say.
On Friday, a bureau of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russians and 3 Russian companies, including St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency famous for trolling on social media. The justice ask pronounced those indicted “had a strategic idea to boar conflict in a U.S. domestic system, including a 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
Twitter’s new restrictions are directed during improving “information quality,” Yoel Roth of a company’s process team said.
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“These changes are an critical step in ensuring we stay ahead of antagonistic activity targeting a essential conversations taking place on Twitter — including elections in a United States and around a world,” Roth said in a statement.
Posting matching messages to mixed accounts, or simultaneously retweeting or fondness a summary from multiple accounts, could assistance safe something into Twitter’s trending list, giving a feign sense of how viral it is among real people.
Twitter pronounced it would give users until Mar 23 to comply before suspending accounts. It done an difference for bots of broad seductiveness such as trembler alerts.
Twitter has burst down on other violations of a terms of service, including feign accounts by people inflating their following.
Conservative complaints
Some U.S. users with regressive politics complained their number of supporters had left down after Twitter asked them to verify their identity. #TwitterLockOut was among a trending topics.
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@dbongino
Former Twitter user Jared Taylor, editor of a white supremacist repository American Renaissance, sued Twitter on Tuesday in state justice in San Francisco, observant a preference to ban him disregarded California law ruling “privately owned public forums.” Twitter did not respond to a ask for comment.
Another company, secretly hold online publisher Medium, recently private accounts belonging to far-right U.S. commentators including Mike Cernovich, who pronounced on his Twitter account on Wednesday that Medium was behaving unlawfully.
Medium pronounced it would not plead particular accounts, though a recent order change criminialized people from spreading “disinformation.”Â
Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/twitter-bots-1.4546561?cmp=rss