Twitter today has announced that between April and June 2018, removed more than 143,000 apps that violated the policies. The company also announced its efforts to stop malicious apps from entering the platform and remove problematic apps to limit the access these apps have on the platform in the first place.
Today it is introducing a new way for all developers to request access to Twitter’s APIs including the changes to increase accountability for apps creating and engaging with content and accounts on Twitter. Starting today, all the new requests from the developer account application process are required to go through a few steps and some additional time to the process of getting started with access to Twitters APIs.
Anyone who wants access to Twitters APIs should first apply for a developers account and once the application has been approved, you’ll be able to create new apps and manage existing apps. However, eventually, all the developers with existing access to the APIs will be required to complete a developer account application in order to maintain their apps.
The company is providing a 90-day notice before enforcing this requirement. It will need all the developers will be required to provide detailed information about how they use or intend to use Twitter’s APIs. Applications that do not comply with Twitter’s policies will be rejected. It should be fairly obvious at this point that applications submitted with incomplete or insufficient information may be delayed.
The company is also limiting the number of apps that a developer can register under one account to 10. Developers who need more than ten can request permission using the API Policy support form. Alongside these changes, it is also introducing new default app-level rate limits for common POST endpoints, as well as a new process for developers to obtain high volume posting privileges.
Twitter starting September 10th, 2018, will be adding new default app-level rate limits that will apply to all requests to create Tweets, Retweets, likes, follows, or Direct Messages. This change represents a significant decrease in the existing rate of POST activity allowed from a single app by default. Finally, Twitter is also introducing a new option for people to report suspected violations of the platform policies. Users can opt the “Report a bad app” option in our Help Center to report.