There's never a dull moment on Twitter as every day users dial up the microblogging site to find main characters and re-adjust their expectations of functionality. Today the giant Magic 8-Ball in the sky shook itself around and spit out a reality where many accounts logged in to discover that some of their account features have been temporarily limited because their accounts appear to be in violation of Twitter's spam policy.
They've been sentenced to three days and zero hours of not being able to follow, like, or retweet. And many of them are profoundly confused by the decision.
You get the idea.
Elon Musk has been focused on purging spam accounts since his early days negotiating the Twitter deal, even tweeting that the agreement was “on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users” before that eventually got sorted out.
A few days ago, Slate chronicled the process of trying to defeat the bots or die trying and emerged quite dubious about the whole thing. What's happening right now seems to be the strongest action to date and is being met with some pushback from those affected who are surprised to learn that they are spam. Always tough to think you are a human and discover you aren't even real. Can mess you up good.
Of course, it's important to stress the caveats of it being very early and the lack of sourced reporting on exactly what's going on. But that's not really any solace to those who got a surprising message and don't have full capabilities right now.
This article was originally published on thebiglead as Many Twitter Users Discovering They Are Spam Accounts.
