The San Francisco established social network also said it would not allow users to use software to concurrently perform other operations such as liking or retweeting from multiple accounts.
Twitter, known for freewheeling debates in short messages, is under pressure from users and Western authorities to stem the cover of false news and foreign propaganda, often done with the help of automated accounts known as bots.
Twitter bots distributed propaganda before the 2016 U.S. elections and have proceeded to inflame U.S. politics under cover of anonymity, academic researchers and U.S. authorities say.
On Friday, the office of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russians and three Russian businesses, including St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency known for trolling on social media. The court paper said those accused “had a strategic goal to sow division in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
Twitter’s new limitations are aimed at improving “information quality,” Yoel Roth of the company’s policy team said.
“These changes are a significant step in ensuring we stay ahead of hateful activity targeting the crucial discussions taking place on Twitter including options in the United States and around the world,” Roth said in a statement.
Posting identical messages to multiple accounts, or concurrently retweeting or liking a message from multiple reports, could help vault something into Twitter’s trending list, giving a false impression of how viral it is between real people.
Twitter said it would give users until March 23 to comply before checking accounts. It made an exception for bots of broad interest such as two alerts.
Twitter has cracked down on other devastations of its terms of service, including fake stories by people inflating their following.
Some U.S. users with conservative politics kicked their number of followers had gone down after Twitter asked them to verify their identity. #TwitterLockOut was among the trending topics.
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