Twitter Suspends Accounts for ‘Tweetdecking’: What this Means for Nigerian Users

In a major crackdown on “tweetdeckers,” twitter suspended several popular accounts on Friday. Some of these accounts, which mostly tweeted jokes and memes, had millions of followers and were suspended in accordance with the new set of rules introduced by Twitter, last month.

The company said in a February blog post:

Keeping Twitter safe and free from spam is a top priority for us. One of the most common spam violations we see is the use of multiple accounts and the Twitter developer platform to attempt to artificially amplify or inflate the prominence of certain Tweets.

https://twitter.com/tommytheworId/status/972353083295649798

Tweetdecking is the act by a network of accounts making tweets go viral by retweeting the same content in exchange for money or more followers. And so, Twitter introduced a set of new rules to combat spam which included the removal of third-party platforms like Tweetdeck that usually like, retweet, or send out identical tweets from multiple accounts.

As a penalty for defiance, violators run the risk of having their accounts being temporarily or permanently suspended.

What Does this Mean for Nigerian Users?

You have probably seen a number of tweets that have retweets into the tens or even hundreds of thousands. Many of these massively viral tweets happen as a result of tweetdecking and are mostly stolen from other users without giving due credit.

Wanting a huge number of followers and lots of likes, Nigerian users engage in these too. Most people want impressively large followings, and might even go as far as paying some set of people to do it for you. But with Twitter now placing bans on users trying to sell, purchase or attempting to inflate their number of followers, retweets and likes, some popular accounts that engage in such might be in trouble.

Tweetdeckers were named after TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned app that allows users to monitor tweets and post to several accounts at once.