Approval to create twitter accounts in an automated fashion?

[FanFriendly]

I have an idea that I think would have a community benefit for Twitter, but in order for me to properly develop it, would require the creation of hundreds of accounts, probably in the neighborhood of ~5000 accounts in order for it to be done properly.

How do I go about getting in contact with someone at Twitter that I could privately address with my idea and either get it approved or disapproved?

[IgorBrigadir]

Sounds dodgy tbh. Would love to hear what the idea is out of curiosity.

There’s nothing wrong with creating bots, or test accounts or even lots of accounts for a specific purpose - the best example is how this interactive story is created with a bunch of different accounts: https://twitter.com/wnd_go . Importantly - none of those are created automatically.

A common feature with novelty / bot accounts that are still active and don’t get suspended is they don’t annoy people and are “opt-in”. Some good advice from here: http://tinysubversions.com/2013/03/basic-twitter-bot-etiquette/

Don’t @mention people who haven’t opted in
Don’t follow Twitter users who haven’t opted in
Don’t use a pre-existing hashtag
Don’t go over your rate limits

I’d also add: Don’t impersonate people to that list - unless it’s SUPER obvious parody like https://twitter.com/DeepDrumpf/ & https://twitter.com/DeepLearnBern

[FanFriendly]

The “service” the accounts would provide would definitely be opt-in and not likely to annoy anyone. It’s hard for me to explain it in depth without possibly opening up the idea to squatters. To put it very generically, the idea involves making Twitter less annoying for your followers that don’t share in all of your same interests.

As it stands, there’s basically no commercial intent behind the idea, it’s basically something where I want to solve a pet peeve of mine.

I’ve done some analysis and the overlap between the pattern of account name I’d like to use, and existing accounts is around 2%, so doesn’t seem likely to bother anyone.

Of course the primary issue is creating the accounts and the mobile phone requirements that entails.

[andypiper]

Thanks for asking about this.

There’s no API method or process for you to create new accounts programatically, and as @IgorBrigadir suggests this isn’t something we’re looking to add as a priority, since it could easily be abused by folks who do not share your good intentions.

Moreover, I’m not aware of any method of bulk creating accounts - you’ll find that our automated tools restrict of large numbers of accounts from a single location in a short period of time, and I don’t believe that is easy to change.