Suspension - What's the daily/hourly unfollow limit for each user ? What is the aggressive behaviour?

eksigundem · 2013-08-11T07:32:14.000Z

Any comment ?

eksigundem · 2013-08-27T19:18:27.000Z

Any comments please ?

truebe · 2013-08-28T20:29:35.000Z

Hello,

We do not have an explicit upper bound on follow/unfollow actions permitted by our Platform Policies; however, we do disallow bulk, automated, and aggressive follow/unfollow behavior. While there is no limit on number, there is a limit on behavior. To comply with our Policies for follows/unfollows please ensure that all follows/unfollows are performed manually, are not en-queued or performed in bulk, and follow the behavior expected when following accounts on Twitter.com. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Regards,
@truebe
Twitter Platform Operations

eksigundem · 2013-10-30T18:46:41.000Z

In our website, every unfollow and follow action is done manually. Although we get requests for auto follow-auto unfollow. We don’t permit our users to make auto actions. User must click a button for each action. User can click a button in 0,5 seconds and he/she can unfollow 110 people in 55 seconds.
We offer our users daily 110 actions, which includes follow/unfollow/block/unblock etc. If users exceeds this number we advice them to visit our website tomorrow.
Our website got a suspension 4 months ago. And we couldn’t get a reply to our appeal for 5 days. After 5 days our application re-enabled. We lost some of our users in this period. From the API team we are told that our unfollow/fullow numbers are too high. We asked “what is the daily limit ?” we couldn’t get an answer. And we changed daily action limit from 160 to 110 to not to be suspended again.
I see that manageflitter.com gives 2000 actions a day, justunfollow.com gives unlimited action for paid users. And my visitors frequently wants us to risen the 110 action limit. But our team is afraid to increase the limit again. Because we are suspended one time.

You say that there is no daily limit for frienshipdestroy and friendshipcreate. But we need a number or a behaviour to implement in our website. Justunfollow gives unlimited action to its paid users. How do you permit them or what do our team misses in this situtation.

Thank you for your attention and help.

truebe · 2013-10-30T19:31:24.000Z

Hello,

As we stated previously we do not have an explicit upper bound on follow/unfollow actions permitted by our Platform Policies; however, we do disallow bulk, automated, and aggressive follow/unfollow behavior. The issue at hand is not one of limits, but one of throttling and we have no number to give beyond our site limits: https://support.twitter.com/articles/15364-twitter-limits-api-updates-and-following

These limits aren’t a number that users should attempt to hit every day, nor should you as a developer on our Platform encourage users to hit these limits every day. Furthermore, even if limits have been implemented on your service, if your service is being used to follow/unfollow users in an aggressive manner that is disallowed by the Twitter Rules (https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311-the-twitter-rules), we may still suspend your service to prevent this behavior and ask you to make further changes.

eksigundem · 2013-10-30T19:55:53.000Z

“Aggressive behaviour” is very open sentence. Our team can do their best to disable aggresive behaviour. If you can’t give an explicit upper bound for follow/unfollow unfollow actions, can you provide what is an aggressive behaviour ?

If a user unfollows 100 people in 5 minute is this aggresive ? or is this aggressive if user make it in 2 minutes ? I can say that 2 minute is aggressive but some other developer can say that 2 minute is not aggressive 1 minute is aggressive.

As I noted we don’t offer automated follow/unfollow, but we don’t know what is an aggressive behaviour ? We must limit our users to not to make an aggressive behaviour. But how can we implement an anti aggressive sytem without knowing that what is the agressive behaviour rate limits in Twitter API Team’s members ?

eksigundem · 2013-10-30T20:01:45.000Z

Also this page notes like this: https://support.twitter.com/articles/68916-following-rules-and-best-practices

What is aggressive following?
Aggressive following is defined as indiscriminately following hundreds of accounts just to garner attention. However, following a few users if their accounts seem interesting is normal and is not considered aggressive.

We did allow 200 or 150 unfollow/follow for each day. We never permitted hundreds of follows.

frankkolnacki · 2014-02-05T22:31:55.000Z

The aggressive follow policy is nebulous and after a suspension the user is on pins and needles wondering if their next ‘follow’ will put them over the unknown follow/unfollow limit. Before I had accumulated 20K followers, if I followed too many users in a day, a nag popup would tell me so and further following would be locked out for the next 24 hours. That was a great system since I didn’t know what the upper limit was anyway. I also used two active api follow tools to remove non-follow backs and got no suspensions. After I hit 20K followers, I went 50 more follows than I had followers and got suspended and inactivated for the first time with no warning whatsoever. Why is there no more nag pop up and 24 hour lock out in place, if I accidentally follow too many in one day? That’s the fair way to curtail aggressive following, not randomly being suspending based on an algorithm that leaves the twitter user bewildered about what an upper limit ‘might’ be. Thanks for your consideration.

SensayFeelsYou · 2014-03-05T14:28:00.000Z

I agree with @frankkolnacki entirely about notifying us rather than suspending. I am on my “last strike” with this account and every single suspension has been due to “aggressive” following or unfollowing. “aggressive following” is an unreasonable term for getting one suspended and even resulting in permanent ban - it is clear that the current system cannot pick up the difference from manual following/unfollowing or automated, because EVERY suspension I have encountered has been through manual following/unfollowing. Please… either create a more clear set of rules for following/unfollowing (examples…) [the number of seconds between each follow / number of follows/unfollows allowed per hour / notifying a person that they have reached an hourly/daily follow limit, the same way there is a direct message limit] or remove the rule entirely - innovate or remove, because the current follow/unfollow rule is one without clear legislation.

irenemuller_SA · 2014-05-04T09:10:53.000Z

I agree with @frankkolnack, Please give us better guidelines. The other day I read on a blog submitted in January 2014 you allow( unfallows 1000 follows, by only 100 follows per 24 hour,) but not on the same day… Surely there must be more specific rules made clear… I simply just don’t know where I stand. PLEASE HELP

vincenzoeugenio · 2014-05-23T23:16:43.000Z

@eksigundem Hey I have discovered an answer to your problem.
The twitter system observes agressive follows and unfollows by the length of the interval (in seconds) that one takes between actions. With some research I was able to produce a recursive function outlining exactly how much time these intervals should be. On Twitter & Instagram I have estimated that the average interval time should be between 12 to 14 seconds. This therefore means that you should wait a minimum of 12 seconds between clicking follow or unfollow in order to not appear as an “aggressive user”. The system automatically highlights those accounts who do not wait the suggested interval and locks them.

I do not know why the developers could not provide you with this simple information.

(P.S. I’m a Mathematician)

eksigundem · 2014-05-26T21:20:19.000Z

@vincenzoeugenio , 12 seconds per follow/unfollow is not realistic limit. If it was the limit, every day tens of thousands of people will be suspended. Manually one can unfollow 10 people in 10 seconds.
If someone unfollow 10 people in 10 seconds will he/she be suspended ? No.

So I suppose limits are something like this:
These are only assumptions. God knows what the real limit are.

Daily follow/unfollow limit X people. If you follow/unfollow more than X people in a day,
Hourly limit Y people. If you follow/unfollow more than Y people in an hour,
Daily average follow/unfollow time is Z seconds. If your average follow/unfollow time in a day is bigger than Z seconds,
Hourly average follow/unfollow time is T seconds. If your average follow/unfollow time in a particular hour of the day is bigger than T seconds,
one is suspended.
(Also if user has more than 2k followers, multiply limits with “a.b”, if user is verified multiply limits with 100a, if user has an account older than d years than multiply limit with “d” number)

I have the same opinion with the policies. One shouldn’t do aggressive follow/unfollow. System should have limits. But I also think that rules should be more clear and open. So developers mark their road with respect to these numerical rules.

Note: It seems like 42 weeks passed since my initial post in this thread. Still we don’t have a clear, numerical follow/unfollow rule.

letsgocuh · 2014-05-29T16:21:41.000Z

look, There is not real limit the developer ( sloth pope ) makes it very clear, its a typical rich people thing, do not want the non famous or less fortunate people to rise up, They realize that people were following thousands of people receiving 40% follows back and then unfollow the rest who isn’t following.
developers fail to realize that if your not already famous, no matter how good your tweets are, your not going to get followers like that unless your very attractive or a girl is half naked, which has nothing to do with what they are tweeting.
twitter was suppose to be a promotion thing now they change it, you can have a good product but if no ones knows about it then what? telling 10 people a day isnt going to work out, you have to get exposure talks to hundreds a day because not everyone is going to like it.
people want to stop the bots ! not people who manually click.

All these unbalance rules are causing people to lose followers causing people not to gain anything out of twitter,causing businesses not to get promotion/exposure, meet new people all over the world because of these rules that are not properly set. No matter how interested someone is to your page if you dont follow them back they will unfollow you rather your interesting or not.
WHAT I DONT UNDERSTAND IS HOW YOU TELL SOMEBODY WHO THEY CAN AND CANNOT FOLLOW ANYWAY ???
shouldn’t people have the option to choose ? who they want to follow and the people that are allow to follow them ? i guess not

ImmAltamash · 2014-07-04T17:40:44.000Z

@truebe you mean there is no limit to unfollow & follow but one should follow & unfollow ppl normally not aggressively. Is that 4-5 Follow/Unfollow per minute or what. How @twitter measure aggressivity.

IcelandMusic · 2014-07-17T10:23:14.000Z

Hi.
we used an automated unfollowing tool bc our feed was just to full and we could not provide our users with quality content anymore. So now we are banned from re-following relevant users again. We unfortunately did not know about the limit and as we were following around 8k users, it seemed to be the best solution (that we can’t make undone…). Will we be able to follow users again after 24h or are we suspended for a longer time?
Thanks for any help and advise!

Mandy_Heald · 2014-08-06T18:24:42.000Z

They are a total joke. I’ve seen accounts that have almost 100,000 people following and have like 65,000 they follow who get away with anything. Yet I was suspended for following and unfollowing 100 in a day.

eksigundem · 2014-10-05T20:25:25.401Z

We have an application which was suspended last year for 5 days. So we need to be sure that what is permitted and what is not. More than one year passed but still I don’t know what the aggressive behaviour is.

We don’t make any automation. Users must click a button for each follow or unfollow. We give them 200 follow or follows daily.

We look from developer’s side and we wonder what the aggressive behaviour is.

Is 300 unfollow/day or 500 unfollow/day is aggressive ?
Is 25 unfollow/hour is aggressive ?
Is 50 unfollow/hour and daily total 300 unfollow is aggressive ?

We need clear rules to understand what doesn’t Twitter permit ?
Can’t Twitter api team be more transparent about aggressivenes behaviour ?

TheProject · 2014-11-07T06:00:25.826Z

The whole follow/unfollow thing being rewarded is the problem. It has made Twitter a total joke and should not be allowed at all. Following is for discovering information and hearing what people have to say. No apps should be built around this and it shouldn’t be encouraged. It has reached the point where thousands of profiles exist just to promote apps that help you act like a d*** to other users who work hard to get follows for being legitimately relevant content.

How does that make any sense at all?

BTW though I think the right move is to care about content, one of the top reasons there are limits to this is that Twitter wants you to pay for ads. Yes it’s a promotional platform (now), but they are going to control that.

baltlokis · 2016-02-10T20:00:06.780Z

irenemuller_SA:

I agree with @frankkolnack, Please give us better guidelines. The other day I read on a blog submitted in January 2014 you allow( unfallows 1000 follows, by only 100 follows per 24 hour,) but not on the same day… Surely there must be more specific rules made clear… I simply just don’t know where I stand. PLEASE HELP

totally agree! i love when rules are clear and easely to understand!

andypiper · 2016-02-10T22:45:11.178Z