Twitter clears away 143,000 malicious apps in three months

• Twitter announced that it has cleared away 143,000 apps that were violating its policies.
• Starting 10 September, new default app-level rate limits will kick in that will apply to all actions on Twitter.
  
• The microblogging site has also introduced a ‘Report a bad app’ option for users to flag malicious apps.

Addressing concerns over data sharing and user privacy, Twitter, the microblogging platform, has removed numerous apps that were violating its policies.

These 143,000 malicious apps were cleared away for sending out spam messages, manipulating user conversations or if they were found, in anyway, to be violating the privacy of users on Twitter.

This comes after the massive Cambridge Analytica scandal and the WhatsApp lynching incidents in India. Facebook is facing government inquiries in one of the cases for how user data is being used by third party apps and, in another, for the circulation of fake news.

So, it’s no surprise that Twitter is trying to get ahead of the problem since there have already been many an incidents of harassment and fake news on the site.

Targeting the plague of bad apps in the market, Twitter also announced a few other changes.

Application process

Starting today, a new developer account application process comes into play. It’s aimed at preventing the registration of low quality and sub par apps through user review and checks on policy compliance.

And, one developer account can’t have more than 10 apps registered anymore. It’s still possible, but developers will have to submit a request using the application programming interface (API) policy support form.

The company claims that such measures will allow them to have more control of how developers are using Twitter. It will also give them more visibility over what the developers are doing with user data.

Default app-level rate limits

These default app-level rate limits determine how many tweets, retweets, likes, follows and DMs can go out in a particular set of time. On 10 September, Twitter will be implementing new thresholds that will apply to all apps.

It will be that an app, across all of its user base, will only be allowed 300 tweets as well as retweets every 3 hours. And, every 24 hours an app can push out a 1,000 likes, 1,000 follows, and 15,000 DMs.


Twitter’s been on a clean-up drive for a while now. It was only last month that media reports showcased the platform suspending over 70 million fake accounts over the months of May and June. This included trolls and bots that create spam on site.