How does Twitter account moderation work? Dynamics of account creation and suspension on Twitter during major geopolitical events

TL;DR

This study analyzes Twitter's account creation and suspension patterns during major geopolitical events, revealing rapid suspensions, suspicious behaviors, and content types associated with moderation actions, providing insights into platform abuse and moderation dynamics.

Contribution

It offers a large-scale analysis of Twitter account behaviors during significant events, highlighting suspension patterns and behaviors linked to platform moderation.

Findings

Suspended accounts often interact with legitimate users.

Many accounts are suspended within days of creation.

Suspended accounts frequently share spam and harmful content.

Abstract

Social media moderation policies are often at the center of public debate, and their implementation and enactment are sometimes surrounded by a veil of mystery. Unsurprisingly, due to limited platform transparency and data access, relatively little research has been devoted to characterizing moderation dynamics, especially in the context of controversial events and the platform activity associated with them. Here, we study the dynamics of account creation and suspension on Twitter during two global political events: Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the 2022 French Presidential election. Leveraging a large-scale dataset of 270M tweets shared by 16M users in multiple languages over several months, we identify peaks of suspicious account creation and suspension, and we characterize behaviours that more frequently lead to account suspension. We show how large numbers of accounts get suspended within days from their creation. Suspended accounts tend to mostly interact with legitimate users, as opposed to other suspicious accounts, often making unwarranted and excessive use of reply and mention features, and predominantly sharing spam and harmful content. While we are only able to speculate about the specific causes leading to a given account suspension, our findings shed light on patterns of platform abuse and subsequent moderation during major events.