Twitter To Remove Accounts Who Have Evaded Suspensions

Continuing their recent hardline policy, Twitter on Tuesday announced an initiative to crack down on previously suspended accounts. Twitter’s official "Twitter Safety" account sent out a tweet Tuesday that it would work harder this week to remove accounts belonging to people who have been previously suspended by the social network.

Twitter has many reasons to suspend users, from spam to abusive behavior. Some suspended users find ways to circumvent Twitter’s punishments by making new accounts and continuing what they were doing before. According to Twitter Safety, at least some of these accounts will be suspended by the end of the week.

Twitter did not elaborate on how it would identify these accounts or how quickly it would work to ban them. In a later tweet, Twitter Safety said people who think they were unjustifiably suspended can contact the company to work through the situation.

After years of complaints that Twitter was not doing enough to combat spam and harassment, the site has taken a slightly tougher stance in recent months. In July, it was revealed that Twitter was purging millions of spam accounts per day from the website. That prompted a drop in the company’s share price, even though Twitter promised those accounts were not counted as active users.

Days later, Twitter announced it would stop counting locked accounts as followers. That meant more prominent accounts lost significant numbers of followers. That did not include private accounts belonging to innocent users. Rather, it was focused specifically on accounts that had been locked by Twitter moderators for spam or malicious activity.

Twitter did lose investor confidence after its most recent earnings report. The site actually lost monthly active users, but reported a rise in revenue.

Some users continue to criticize Twitter for lax safety standards in the wake of the company’s ongoing refusal to remove conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from the service, after other prominent platforms did that.