What does twitter deem 'a community benefit' with regards to automation rules and policies?

[AlwaysGeeky]

Hi,

I am interested in developing twitter applications and twitter bots specifically centered around game development and indie gaming. I noticed just recently 2 popular twitter bots that would retweet and interact with specific hashtags in the indie gaming community have been suspended, in regards to the hashtags #gamedev and #indiedev. In doing some research into the twitter policies and rules I found some ambiguity and I would like to know the official stance and some clarity about the policies.

Specifically referencing this policy here: https://support.twitter.com/articles/76915#Retweeting

Automated Retweeting
Automation of Retweets often leads to spam and other negative user experiences; therefore, Retweeting in a bulk or automated manner is prohibited. Automated Retweeting is permitted for apps or accounts that Twitter deems to provide a community benefit.

Would it be possible to get clarification on how Twitter would deem an application or bot to ‘provide community benefit’ and also how would this be evaluated? It would be nice to have some metrics that could be known upfront and before any development takes place so this could be designed into the applications and bots.

For example are there limits on the frequency of hashtag retweeting? Does the content of the tweet matter, images, links, etc? Would the number of followers that a bot has have any relevance to this metric?

Some other popular hashtags that are also used by the indiegaming community on twitter include: #gamedev #indiedev #indiedevhour #ScreenshotSaturday

Thanks for any assistance with this.

[dalemon42]

I would be interested in knowing this as well for my own project.

[AlwaysGeeky]

So I guess there is no official response to this?

[GamePromo]

I’ve been wondering about the same thing. My bot has been locked out 3 times in the last month. It likes and retweets. I get it. I understand how it would get auto-locked, but I think it’s undeserved if anyone actually looked at the quality of the experience it creates.

I believe it offers a great community service. I will send a note to support to ask to not be locked out anymore but I don’t expect any positive response.

I created my bot because all the others are horrible IMO. I’ve spent about 6 months refining it. I have 3 separate filter lists that I constantly update to remove spam and other bots. So many bots just RT #gamedev #indiedev with no filtering and create a spam circle of bots retweeting bots and spammers. I put so much effort into making mine as clean and useful as possible. I cycle through 75 unique search parameters (everything to do with game development, so far beyond those 2 overused hashtags). Beyond that I have a separate list of hot search params for special events. In addition to all that, since many of my search params involve VR, AR, etc, I have a completely different spam filter list for all those hashtags to remove all the porn spam that uses those tags.

I really think this thing I created does a great deal for the game development community. I don’t follow any other game dev bots or developers I don’t know on my personal account. I just follow my bot and it creates a wonderfully curated news stream for my feed. It gets constant thank you @ mentions and DMs from the community.

[andypiper]

Thanks for all the feedback on this. I think the best approach would be to use the Platform Support forms to ask the policy question with regard to specific use cases.