Twitter Is Introducing New Rules ... Again

Fighting spam in the year 2018 might seem like an impossible task.

Spam has existed about as long as the internet has. But social media giant Twitter is taking on the challenge, as spam on Twitter isn't just used to push diet pills but also includes thousands of Russian troll accounts using the platform to influence the 2016 election. 

The company announced in a blog post Wednesday all the changes and developer guidelines that they hope will prevent automated actions that can flood the network.

Twitter, of course, previously had general rules in place to prevent spam, but these guidelines are more specifically targeted at fighting off automated actions.

Starting on March 23, third-party Twitter apps will need to be able to prevent accounts from "bulk-tweeting" or face enforcement, which could include the suspension of the app.

Apps should not allow a user to tweet out the same content from multiple accounts. Similarly, an app should not allow a user to like or retweet the same post from multiple accounts. Twitter will also ban apps that allow identical content with the same hashtag to be posted across multiple accounts.

Twitter will also update it's Tweetdeck tool to reflect these new guidelines.

This plan also follows in the footsteps of the recent changes from December that are intended to reduce the amount of hate speech on the site.