Twitter Suspends 70 Accounts Supporting Bloomberg for ‘Platform Manipulation and Spam’

Photo credit: Brett Carlsen, Getty Images

Part of billionaire Mike Bloomberg’s unprecedented, massive campaign ad rollout has involved enlisting large numbers of accounts on social media to relentlessly parrot the same message to their followers—and Twitter has started cracking down on this abuse of its platform.

According to reporting by the Los Angeles Times, the social media giant has announced it will suspend 70 pro-Bloomberg accounts for effectively pushing political ads, which Twitter has banned from its site for the 2020 election.

“We have taken enforcement action on a group of accounts for violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam,” a Twitter spokesman told the LA Times. “Some of the suspensions will be permanent, while in other cases account owners will have to verify they have control of their accounts.”

The Bloomberg campaign did not comment for the story.

Per the story, Bloomberg has been paying “deputy field organizers” $2,500 a month to take campaign messaging that they can choose whether or not to post. But many posts reviewed by the LA Times found that these online accounts, many of which were created only after the former NYC mayor began his campaign, were blasting out identical text, images, and hashtags.

“By sponsoring hundreds of new accounts that post copy-pasted content,” Twitter explained, “the campaign violated its rules against ‘creating multiple accounts to post duplicative content, ‘posting identical or substantially similar Tweets or hashtags from multiple accounts you operate’ and ‘coordinating with or compensating others to engage in artificial engagement or amplification, even if the people involved use only one account.'”