Twitter Rules- SPAM; how to avoid getting banned?

giraffewarrior · Oct 17, 2016

Hey fellow Twitter-ers...,

Take a look at the SPAM section of Twitter's TOS (found here: https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311), they basically list every strategy you can think of for raising follower count as "spam" which can result in an account ban.

I made my first twitter account today and I'm playing around with it, but I am worried about getting banned on these following grounds.

if you have followed and/or unfollowed large amounts of accounts in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive following or follower churn);
if you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile;

if you post misleading links (e.g. affiliate links, links to malware/clickjacking pages, etc.);
if you are randomly or aggressively following, liking, or Retweeting Tweets;

I'm assuming the tactics mentioned above are commonly used. I didn't have to come to BHW to realize that people are doing these things all the time.

My question to you guys is have you guys done any of these things that constitute "spam" under twitters TOS? Have you faced penalties or bans? I am particularly concerned with the bullet's I've listed in RED.

What procedures should I take to reduce the risk of a ban?

Sleem · Oct 17, 2016

There are many threads on twitter sub forum on how its been a bitch lately, so be carefull

giraffewarrior · Oct 17, 2016

Sleem said:
There are many threads on twitter sub forum on how its been a bitch lately, so be carefull

I noticed twitter automatically unfollowed many of the accounts I auto-followed. Frustrated.

HoNeYBiRD · Oct 17, 2016

It's still not that easy to get outright suspended. However getting locked is easier than it was before, but it's not a biggie, if you have phone numbers, what you can access, when shit happens.

Honestly, i wouldn't worry much while operating only a single account manually. When you do manual tasks, you do it naturally with different delays and more than likely you don't hit the daily limits either. You'll be just fine.

Twitter doesn't unfollow automatically anyone, those users either weren't followed by you in the first place (maybe you were led to believe that you successfully followed them, but in fact you weren't) or they were suspended after the fact and can no longer be found in the list of of your followings.

ankit03 · Oct 17, 2016

Someway twitter is taking hard actions on spamming. 2 years ago twitter is easy to spam on but now they have strong ways to detect spam and lock the accounts asking for either phone verification

giraffewarrior · Oct 17, 2016

HoNeYBiRD said:
It's still not that easy to get outright suspended. However getting locked is easier than it was before, but it's not a biggie, if you have phone numbers, what you can access, when shit happens.

Honestly, i wouldn't worry much while operating only a single account manually. When you do manual tasks, you do it naturally with different delays and more than likely you don't hit the daily limits either. You'll be just fine.

Twitter doesn't unfollow automatically anyone, those users either weren't followed by you in the first place (maybe you were led to believe that you successfully followed them, but in fact you weren't) or they were suspended after the fact and can no longer be found in the list of of your followings.

Thanks for the tips, my friend.

ankit03 said:
Someway twitter is taking hard actions on spamming. 2 years ago twitter is easy to spam on but now they have strong ways to detect spam and lock the accounts asking for either phone verification

I started using an auto-follow script as soon as my acct was set up and I got locked and needed to input phone number; got a little scared TBH thinking it was the end of the world. Guess not! XD

I'm just doing 1 account at the moment and now you got me wondering, what is the daily follow limit like for newly created accounts?

ankit03 · Oct 17, 2016

giraffewarrior said:
I started using an auto-follow script as soon as my acct was set up and I got locked and needed to input phone number; got a little scared TBH thinking it was the end of the world. Guess not! XD

I'm just doing 1 account at the moment and now you got me wondering, what is the daily follow limit like for newly created accounts?

I think google voice numbers can be used to verify twitter accounts. I have used them 1 year ago they were working but dont know now

giraffewarrior · Oct 17, 2016

ankit03 said:
I think google voice numbers can be used to verify twitter accounts. I have used them 1 year ago they were working but dont know now

I tried my Google number, and my other virtual number; neither worked. Needed a non-virtual number for successful verification

ankit03 · Oct 17, 2016

giraffewarrior said:
I tried my Google number, and my other virtual number; neither worked. Needed a non-virtual number for successful verification

Ahh okay i think you should try real sim cards then , you can get them off from ebay if you buy in bulk like 2$ per number i guess

giraffewarrior · Oct 17, 2016

ankit03 said:
Ahh okay i think you should try real sim cards then , you can get them off from ebay if you buy in bulk like 2$ per number i guess

How many times can a unique number be used for verification of a single account? Do you need a new number each time?!

ankit03 · Oct 17, 2016

I think you can verify 3-4 accounts with 1 number but i am not sure. we can use same number for few account verification for fb but i am not sure about twitter

MatteoMatt · Oct 17, 2016

I haven't done a ton of marketing on twitter, but obviously its not a huge deal about their actual terms.

What really matters is their spam filter, which to be honest yeah I was getting phone lockouts FAST. Im taking after about 30 to 40 follows, I got it unlocked almost instantly, but still it seems mass follows can't happen very fast.

HoNeYBiRD · Oct 17, 2016

giraffewarrior said:
How many times can a unique number be used for verification of a single account? Do you need a new number each time?!

You can use the same phone number to verify/re-verify an account as many times as you like or are asked to do it.

Furthermore according to the Twitter rules, a phone number can be associated with up to 10 accounts, so practically you can verify 10 accounts with one phone number. Obviously, if you verify accounts using the same number, you link those accounts together, which can be safe for now, but we can never be sure what will happen in the future.

In the last few months (since May) Twitter tightened their security noticeably. Lately you can't really do anything until your account isn't phone verified. The single most important thing is to have phone numbers, what you can access and keep verifying your account when Twitter asks for it. If you keep doing actions such as following, you'll need to verify your account every day for a few days, usually 3 days. That's one password reset either via email or SMS on day 1, one SMS lock on day 2 and another SMS lock on day 3. If you successfully combat those, you will be able to use the account again like usual without getting locked.

Protip: if you're unsure about the lifetime of a phone number (e.g. because it's a virtual one), after you completed the 3 roadblocks i mentioned above, just remove the phone number from your account, so you won't get locked out, if Twitter asks you to verify again at any point, which rarely happens. If and when that occurs, you can use an entirely new number to verify the account or you can use the old one, if you still have access to it.

ankit03 · Oct 17, 2016

HoNeYBiRD said:
You can use the same phone number to verify/re-verify an account as many times as you like or are asked to do it.

Furthermore according to the https://support.twitter.com/articles/110250, a phone number can be associated with up to 10 accounts, so practically you can verify 10 accounts with one phone number. Obviously, if you verify accounts using the same number, you link those accounts together, which can be safe for now, but we can never be sure what will happen in the future.

In the last few months (since May) Twitter tightened their security noticeably. Lately you can't really do anything until your account isn't phone verified. The single most important thing is to have phone numbers, what you can access and keep verifying your account when Twitter asks for it. If you keep doing actions such as following, you'll need to verify your account every day for a few days, usually 3 days. That's one password reset either via email or SMS on day 1, one SMS lock on day 2 and another SMS lock on day 3. If you successfully combat those, you will be able to use the account again like usual without getting locked.

Protip: if you're unsure about the lifetime of a phone number (e.g. because it's a virtual one), after you completed the 3 roadblocks i mentioned above, just remove the phone number from your account, so you won't get locked out, if Twitter asks you to verify again at any point, which rarely happens. If and when that occurs, you can use an entirely new number to verify the account or you can use the old one, if you still have access to it.

o wow twitter rules says we can verify 10 accounts with 1 number?? ...great, i didnt know that

HoNeYBiRD · Oct 17, 2016

ankit03 said:
o wow twitter rules says we can verify 10 accounts with 1 number?? ...great, i didnt know that

Yes.

It says:
"Adding your phone number to multiple accounts:
You can have the same phone number associated with up to 10 Twitter accounts."

BufferOver · Oct 19, 2016

HoNeYBiRD said:
You can use the same phone number to verify/re-verify an account as many times as you like or are asked to do it.

Furthermore according to the Twitter rules, a phone number can be associated with up to 10 accounts, so practically you can verify 10 accounts with one phone number. Obviously, if you verify accounts using the same number, you link those accounts together, which can be safe for now, but we can never be sure what will happen in the future.

In the last few months (since May) Twitter tightened their security noticeably. Lately you can't really do anything until your account isn't phone verified. The single most important thing is to have phone numbers, what you can access and keep verifying your account when Twitter asks for it. If you keep doing actions such as following, you'll need to verify your account every day for a few days, usually 3 days. That's one password reset either via email or SMS on day 1, one SMS lock on day 2 and another SMS lock on day 3. If you successfully combat those, you will be able to use the account again like usual without getting locked.

Protip: if you're unsure about the lifetime of a phone number (e.g. because it's a virtual one), after you completed the 3 roadblocks i mentioned above, just remove the phone number from your account, so you won't get locked out, if Twitter asks you to verify again at any point, which rarely happens. If and when that occurs, you can use an entirely new number to verify the account or you can use the old one, if you still have access to it.

How about following/unfollowing limits? Having tons of numbers isn't a big problem, but following only 50 people per day it is

HoNeYBiRD · Oct 19, 2016

BufferOver said:
How about following/unfollowing limits? Having tons of numbers isn't a big problem, but following only 50 people per day it is

That's the point. If you successfully tackled those mentioned 3 roadblocks - which you will, if you keep following and re-verifying when Twitter asks for it-, so when you surpassed that, you can follow up to the daily limit, which is 800-1,000/acc.

Regarding to unfollowing: i've never experienced any limits/never got locked because of it and i do 800-1,000/day/acc

Noah Hawryshko · Oct 19, 2016

HoNeYBiRD said:
That's the point. If you successfully tackled those mentioned 3 roadblocks - which you will, if you keep following and re-verifying when Twitter asks for it-, so when you surpassed that, you can follow up to the daily limit, which is 800-1,000/acc.

Regarding to unfollowing: i've never experienced any limits/never got locked because of it and i do 800-1,000/day/acc

And you're doing 1k per day without getting your follows ghosted? I find that hard to believe. There's got to be something more to it.

mkight · Oct 19, 2016

giraffewarrior said:
Thanks for the tips, my friend.

I started using an auto-follow script as soon as my acct was set up and I got locked and needed to input phone number; got a little scared TBH thinking it was the end of the world. Guess not! XD

I'm just doing 1 account at the moment and now you got me wondering, what is the daily follow limit like for newly created accounts?

I prefer to create an account, do a couple of follows, a couple of retweets and a tweet or 2 then let it sit for 7 to 10 days. After that period I slowly ramp it up. It looks more normal that way.

HoNeYBiRD · Oct 19, 2016

Noah Hawryshko said:
And you're doing 1k per day without getting your follows ghosted? I find that hard to believe. There's got to be something more to it.

Yes, i'm surprised myself, but it's true, neither the tweets, nor the notifications are ghosted. Maybe it has something to do with overall account health, ips, account creation.

When a few months back Twitter made our lives harder, i took a break. When i came back, i started everything from scratch, ditched the old, ghosted accounts. Got new proxies, this time i didn't buy the accounts, but made them myself (not manually, but with a bot, which uses Twitter mobile), phone and email verified them and make them as legit looking as possible. I guess they can become ghosted further down the line, but they're not there yet, fortunately and i'm planning to keep it that way.

1 domain per account, 2 accounts per proxy.

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