Twitter Takes Aim at Anonymous Egg Accounts

There are massive bot farms on Twitter that are obvious to even casual observers and most of them don&#x27;t have &quot;egg&quot; accounts anymore. Look at the auto-replies to any political tweet, major news story, or from a popular account, all automated garbage that follows the same template.<p>Why Twitter ignores the crap which pollutes their product is amazing to me. Maybe they don&#x27;t want to touch them because it ups the engagement numbers and inflates active users?

Interested to see how penalizing accounts for &#x27;repeatedly tweeting at non-followers&#x27; is going to work when most of what I see on the platform is people messaging celebs who don&#x27;t follow them back

So because I see no reason to upload a photo my 7 year old twitter account is now considered second rate whereas the bot account created last week is not because it was updated to upload a random profile image.<p>Seems a bit like trying to claim they are doing something while nothing important gets done.

Today, the egg, tomorrow, unverified account names. Are they going full Facebook?<p>And filtering out keywords in messages... I suppose that&#x27;s ok, and certainly their prerogative, but talk about creating more social bubbles. As much as I disagree with the random twits on the site, it reminds me that not everyone is a left-leaning political hobbyist. Hearing things you don&#x27;t necessarily like is part of being an adult.

The keyword filtering strikes me as the most filter bubble inducing thing I&#x27;ve heard in a while.

Just got this today:<p>Good day there! How are you today? I am a girl who just moved to live in this city! I have done a search on Twitter to look for man in our area and yeah I found your Twitter. In case you don&#x27;t mind we can make friend and chat chit! Do you have snapchat? Please add me on Snapchat nick: [redacted] so we will chat and I can show you my personal photos! I don&#x27;t like to chitchat here:) It&#x27;s boring! Lets Snapchat! Sometimes I also use another Snapchat nick: [redacted] on another cellphone, kindly add this nick too if you did not see me online on Snapchat nick: [redacted] :) Hope to chat with you really soon.

I hope they took into account that blind users usually also don&#x27;t upload avatars.

Pretty sure my only use case for Twitter is to tweet at non-followers, eg &quot;get customer service&quot;.

No mention of how filtering might apply to Twitter&#x27;s trending algorithms. Since much of the activities of bots are aimed at pushing a narrative to a wider audience (getting it trending), it seems like Twitter is currently neglecting one of the most serious harms that bots pose to the community.<p>I get that Twitter is focusing on harassment in order to make people feel safe when using their platform, but I hope the solution will also effect this other aspect of bot use&#x2F;account abuse.

I see Twitter is getting harder and harder to use anonymously. As someone living under a totalitarian government that is tightening its grip everyday on free speech and the internet in general, this worries me.<p>Trying to signup and use Twitter using Tor is practically impossible.<p>I understand the spam problem on Twitter is out of control,but I wish there was a way to use it anonymously.

Translation: &quot;Wired takes aim at people running ad blockers.&quot;

What I don&#x27;t understand: Why doesn&#x27;t twitter take moderation seriously? On reddit it&#x27;s left up to the moderators of each sub. It does very. But having a very &quot;up to interpretation&quot; but yet not politically biased set of rules and enforcement is great.<p>We don&#x27;t have a code of conduct or any of the nonsense. Someone violates it and we catch it, they&#x27;re gone. (Also that&#x27;s subjective to time based on how many times we caught them as well) End of.

Dammit. I thought I could now remove any tweet that had the word &#x27;trump&#x27; in it[^2], which meant I could refollow a bunch of people and make twitter much more useful, but it seems that it only works for notifications in which you are mentioned[1], which means the feature is pretty pointless, at least for most people.<p>[1]:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.twitter.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20175032" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.twitter.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20175032</a> [^2]: this is a complaint I have with almost any social media, even google plus. I want a persons insight on subject x, I don&#x27;t want to hear their political ramblings, no matter what side they are on - politics are poison.

A cool way to circumvent the keyword filtering: www.seecret.io

Next they&#x27;ll want proof that the person in the avatar is actually you.

Faster please. Anything that accelerates Twitter&#x27;s demise is ok in my books. Bonus points if wounds are self-inflicted.<p>I&#x27;m old enough to remember when you only had to deal with the crazies holding signs and hollering if you went to certain parts of town. If you didn&#x27;t go and&#x2F;or engage the crazies they didn&#x27;t really exist. Sort of like if a tree falls but nobody is there...<p>Now everyone thinks their opinion is valuable and spouts nonsense all over Twitter. Time to take away the soapbox.