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Credit to Author: Louise Matsakis| Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2018 18:31:37 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Several weeks ago, <\/span>my friend Jeff signed up for an online Twitter application that promised to delete his old tweets. It was advertised merely as a simple way to clear your online presence, but after Jeff used it, he noticed that his account began retweeting spam. Out of an abundance of caution, he deleted his Twitter account entirely.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, Twitter announced<\/a> steps it was taking to curb this exact sort of abuse. Between May and June of this year, the social network says it deleted more than 143,000 apps that violated its policies prohibiting<\/a> developers from using its APIs to automate spam, abuse, or violate people\u2019s privacy, among other rules.<\/p>\n The move is part of a greater cleanup happening at Twitter. Earlier this month, the company announced<\/a> that it was removing some suspicious accounts from people\u2019s follower lists, and the The Washington Post<\/em> reported<\/a> it had recently suspended more than 70 million fake accounts entirely.<\/p>\n Automated accounts often play a central, positive role on Twitter. There\u2019s a Twitter bot that creates<\/a> emoji aquariums, one<\/a> that spits out \u201cdeep\u201d questions about the universe, and another<\/a> that tweets anonymized information about individual Americans each hour using data from the decennial US census. Developers also use Twitter\u2019s API to create all sorts of tools, like Nuzzle<\/a>, an app that displays news stories the people you follow on Twitter are talking about.<\/p>\n There are thousands of other useful, delightful, or otherwise harmless apps on Twitter, but the social network has also been plagued by ones that automate abuse, leveraging Twitter\u2019s tools to violate its own policies. Twitter apps have been created that direct message spam, help carry out misinformation campaigns, and assist governments conducting<\/a> online surveillance. Now, the social network is cracking down on them, as part of a wider effort to make Twitter \u201chealthier.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to removing problematic apps, Twitter announced Tuesday that it is rolling out new policies to prevent ill-intentioned developers from getting access to its APIs in the first place. Twitter will now require all developers interested in creating apps to go through a stricter application process, which was initially launched<\/a> in November for access to its \u201cpremium\u201d APIs. Developers already using Twitter\u2019s APIs will also need to go through the process; Twitter says they will be given 90 days notice before enforcing the requirement.<\/p>\n The application will require developers provide \u201cdetailed information about how they use or intend to use Twitter\u2019s APIs so that we can better ensure compliance with our policies,\u201d Yoel Roth, Twitter\u2019s platform policy manager, and Rob Johnson, a senior product management director, wrote in their blog post announcing the change.<\/p>\n Twitter is also imposing new limits on developers whose applications are accepted. For example, a single developer account can now only register 10 apps by default, and must submit a request for the ability to create more. Apps will now also be limited in the amount of automated activity they can facilitate. A Twitter bot, for example, will only be allowed to tweet or retweet 300 times in an hour and follow only 1000 people in a day. In addition, Twitter rolled out a new tool<\/a> where users can report malicious apps and API abuses.<\/p>\n These new limits expand on rules Twitter introduced<\/a> in February to cut down on spam and tactics like those used in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, when Russian propagandists created networks of bots to artificially amplify<\/a> political messages.<\/p>\n Twitter also isn\u2019t the only social network that has struggled to monitor developers using its platform. Facebook continues<\/a> to weather fallout after news broke earlier this year that it had allowed the political data firm Cambridge Analytica<\/a> to siphon off data belonging to more than 80 million people<\/a> via a personality quiz app.<\/p>\n In response, Facebook also tightened its policies for developers and began an audit<\/a> of apps had requested access to user data in the past. It has so far deleted<\/a> at least 200 of them.<\/p>\n Twitter and Facebook have for years welcomed developers who want to use their platforms to create everything from silly bots to entire businesses. The idea was to facilitate the creation of an entire ecosystem, which could live on top of a social network. Now, they\u2019re realizing how thousands of developers have abused that access for their own gain\u2014at the expense of users.<\/p>\n