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The Australian based company enabled twitter accounts to manage followers, growth and other analytic metrics. Before Twitter revoked their developer agreement, ManageFlitter boasted their corporate customer base which included large companies like General Electric on their homepage. ManageFlitter stood out to be the legitimate follower management tool amongst the spam competitors like Unfollowspy or any other tool that tweets a user’s latest report. In compliance with Twitter terms of service, ManageFlitter following and unfollowing was a manual function for users, at the free level. A free user and capped at 20 unfollows a day, hardly capable of spam mass following. Yet Twitter sent out an email telling a different story.
Hello,
This is a policy violation notice from Twitter API Policy. An application registered to your Twitter account – ManageFlitter, app ID xxx – has been found in violation of the Developer Agreement and Policy <https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/agreement-and-policy.html>, Automation Rules <https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-automation>, and the Twitter Rules <https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules>. Specifically, your app facilitates bulk and aggressive follow behavior, such as “follow churn.”
Due to the severity of this violation, as well as prior spam violations by your app, this app is permanently suspended and will not be restored. While you are eligible to apply for a developer account and register a new, compliant app, any apps that substantially duplicate the functionality of app ID xxxx will also be suspended.
Regards,
Twitter API Policy
This deactivation email came last Thursday. Given the detrimental impact on the business model that relies on Twitter, ManageFlitter scrambled to appease Twitter by trying tweak the functionality of their tool.
Unfortunately, ManageFlitter remains unavailable.
On Friday evening Sydney Australia time, we attempted to bring the ManageFlitter application back up using a separate Twitter API key. We removed all follow functionality from ManageFlitter. This was in the hope that Twitter’s apparent concern with ManageFlitter’s follow/unfollow capability would be resolved if our application had no follow functionality. Unfortunately, with no communication at all from Twitter, it is exceptionally difficult to know what the best pathway forward is for the product.
On Saturday morning Sydney time, Twitter again revoked access to the Twitter API linked to this new API key – rendering ManageFlitter unavailable. No detailed information was provided to us over and above a generic deactivation email from Twitter support.
On Saturday morning Twitter also deactivated all API keys relating to our test and staging and environments. In addition, Twitter deactivated the API key relating to our new product ManageSocial – a product we have been working on for 2 years that provides Social Media analytics, publishing, and curation tools. ManageSocial was approved by Twitter in September 2018 for Twitter API access.
We again have reached out to Twitter to try to determine a way forward. We obviously have full control of these products and can change any features as required by Twitter.
In a long thread, CEO Kevin Garber expressed frustration with Twitter for their lack of communication and called into question their commitment to improve developer relations who Jack Dorsey, in 2015, claimed he wanted to reset.
3/ Of course products like Twitter can change their TOS, or can change requirements for ecosystem partners. We always support ongoing efforts to improve Twitter and the Twitter APIs.
— Kevin Garber (@Ke_Ga) February 5, 2019
With no signs of improving relations with Twitter, on Tuesday, ManageFlitter initiated the process to for customers to cancel their subscriptions.
The link to action ManageFlitter subscription cancellations is now live.
Please visit this link to action subscription cancellations:
https://app.manageflitter.com/cancel
All of our customer information remains secure. All credit card information remains secure with the payment providers.
We thank you for your patience and for choosing ManageFlitter.
ManageFlitter did not return requests for comment. The most recent release of ManangeFlitter allows usesers to access their data on the site but the site remains unconnected to Twitter.
Related: DDoS and Twitter attack in same day. Someone’s not happy with us.
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