Some Twitter changes to curtail spam tweets and “Tweetdecking”

March 7, 2018

In a move to prevent the growth of spam and fake news, Twitter are making changes to their Tweetdeck platform.

“To be clear: Twitter prohibits any attempt to use automation for the purposes of posting or disseminating spam, and such behaviour may result in enforcement action” Yoel Roth, manager of trust and safety at Twitter, wrote in a blog post.

Note – this is ironic as Tweetdeck is their own application that facilitates this behaviour!!

For those of you who are scratching your heads now asking what is Tweetdeck and how it helps spread fake news/spam let me break it down for you:

Tweetdeck is a platform mainly used by digital professionals to monitor and post from Twitter accounts. For those of us who work in social media management, it’s a very useful tool where we can monitor what’s going on with all of our clients and post from their accounts, including the ability to schedule posts into the future.

However, in the last couple of years a new practice has emerged known as “tweetdecking” whereby users are tweeting content across many accounts added to their Tweetdeck in exchange for payment.

Have you ever noticed several famous accounts tweet the exact same thing at the same time? That’s tweetdecking!

Basically, what these accounts are doing is using multiple accounts to cause their tweets to go viral.

It can be something simple like a company trying to spread their offers, a celebrity trying to go viral or something more sinister when it’s someone creating fake news and spreading it.

If you see a tweet that has a huge number of likes and retweets and it’s appeared in your feed more than a couple of times, are you more likely to believe it?

With these new changes Tweetdeck users will no longer be able to bulk tweet, retweet, like or follow using several accounts at the same time.

These changes will also affect third party applications such as Hootsuite where you can do similar actions.

So, in a way it’s good news as it prevents users being able to spam others with fake news and nonsense tweets….

However, for those of us that use Tweetdeck and have those times where it’s relevant to post or retweet from two accounts, we’ll just have to do it separately and take an extra five minutes (we don’t have!!) switching between accounts.

Check out our latest Fuzion Win Happy Podcast where Greg Canty and Alma Brosnan discuss these changes and also the features of Tweetdeck and Hootsuite that may be useful to heavy social media users:

“Tweetdecking and other social media developments”