Twitter Limits Automated Tweeting After Bot Lockout

Twitter announced Wednesday new limits on automated tweets and multiple accounts operated by the same user in what is viewed as the company’s latest effort to crack down on spam and political propaganda spread through bots.

The new rules prohibit developers from using any system that simultaneously post tweets with “identical or substantially similar” content from multiple accounts at once. It also bars users from making actions such as liking, retweeting and following across multiple accounts at the same time.

In order to implement the changes, Twitter will remove many of the features that enable such behavior from its own apps including TweetDeck. Third-party developers will have until March 23 to comply the the new rules.

With the new rules in place, users will still be able to send a tweet and have multiple accounts retweeted but won’t be able to use what the company describes as “bulk, aggressive, or very high-volume automated retweeting”—behaviors that are typically enabled through automation tools.

There are some exceptions to the rules: alerts regarding “weather, emergency, or other public service announcements of broad community interest” will be exempted from the limitations, as they provide essential information and need to be spread to as many people as possible in a short period of time.

For users that don’t fall under the exemption, Twitter no longer allows “posting duplicative or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts you control, or creating duplicate or substantially similar accounts, with or without the use of automation.”

Twitter also left room in its new rules to allow the company to stomp out any trends that it views as “inorganic” or created through tampering efforts. That includes trending topics and hashtags created or posted “with an intent to subvert or manipulate the topic, or to artificially inflate the prominence of a hashtag or topic.”

In a blog post announcing the new limits, Twitter’s head of API (application program interface) policy and product trust Yoel Roth said the company’s actions are “an important step in ensuring we stay ahead of malicious activity targeting the crucial conversations taking place on Twitter—including elections in the United States and around the world.”

Twitter is one of several social networks that have come under heavy fire for providing a platform that allowed Russian trolls and bots to spread political propaganda during the 2016 United States presidential election.

Last month, Twitter revealed that more than 50,000 accounts on the platform were linked to Russian propaganda and nearly 700,000 Americans were exposed to that content—much of which is believed to have been produced and spread by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian bot farm operated out of St. Petersburg and often associated with the Russian government.

The crackdown Wednesday led to thousands of accounts on Twitter being purged—many of which followed prominent conservative and alt-right figures on the platform. The move has caused a fair amount of outrage among conservative users of the platform.