Read on Twitter
A few days ago Twitter restricted or outright banned 300+ of the #artbot accounts. I thought it would be a good idea to explain the situation in detail and give you a glimpse into our Art Spam criminal enterprise. Buckle up! 
1/14 Why were the accounts restricted? On Friday I spoke with someone from Twitter who claims that the action was taken because the #artbots violated the following automation rule: “Spam or bother users, or otherwise send them unsolicited messages.”
2/14 Ok, but those rules also include "Build solutions that automatically broadcast helpful information in Tweets" and "Run creative campaigns that auto-reply to users who engage with your content". Read for yourself https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-automation
3/14 What were these unsolicited messages? Here’s an example. In this tweet I am introducing myself to a new follower and recommending a similar art account. Helpful? Creative auto-reply campaign?
4/14 But were these spammy? Well, users didn't explicitly ask for them but you can reasonably argue that by following an account you give that account permission to engage with you. Don't like it? No problem, just unfollow
5/14 How often were these recs sent out? A recommendation was sent to new followers once per month. So even if you followed 100 #artbot accounts in a single day you would only receive one recommendation. (Real spammers are laughing so hard right now)
6/14 Being accountable art spammers, @ItsCodyBraun and I saved every single art recommendation the #artbots ever sent out. Per 1,670,536 followers only 336,996 recommendations were ever sent. It gets better, out of that number only 19% were repeat recs. Do the math.
7/14 Here’s a chart that shows the distribution of recommendations per follower. The average number of unique recs per follower is 1.3! Guess how many people received more than 10 recs ever? Three!
8/14 For example, the amazing art fan(!!) @SublingualArt who follows 50+ #artbots received only ten recs between 2019-06-19 and 2020-04-10 from ten different accounts.
9/14 How long has this been going on? The first recommendation was sent 2018-06-23, the last on 2020-04-10. Here’s the chart of every art recommendation ever sent. The spike at the very beginning was due to a bug introduced by yours truly
10/14 You’ve been doing this since 2018? Yes, and in that time I spoke at several internal Twitter events and was interviewed by various teams about my work. Even with all that, nobody at @Twitter took a minute to send us as much as a DM before nuking the accounts. Ouch…
11/14 It is just Twitter accounts, what’s the big deal? Actually, it is a big deal, there is a real cost to this. Over the years @ItsCodyBraun and I have spent thousands of hours working on this project and tens of thousands of dollars to keep our servers humming.
12/14 We believe that sharing art is important and we're more than happy to invest towards this goal. The only thing we ask in return is to be treated with respect. Don’t be an ass Twitter, if you see that we are falling outside your vaguely-defined rules then give us a heads up!
13/14 Are we beyond reproach? Hardly! We make mistakes and our code is full of bugs. We are more than willing to look at the recommendation algorithm and make changes.
14/14 What happens next? We’ve disabled the recommendation algorithm and sent a list of affected accounts to Twitter. Now we wait...
P.S. Even though I feel upset with Twitter I want to give a shoutout to Twitter’s @jessicagarson. Jessica listened to my complaints and is helping me to figure out how to bring the accounts back.
