What's with all of the Crypto Twitter Shadow Bans and Suspensions Lately?

Recently there's been a lot of action on twitter regarding $crypto. It started with a rush of spam accounts impersonating influencers such as @officialmcafee and @justinsuntron. Until finally crypto twitter influencers like John McAfee really started pressing @jack (the creator and ceo of twitter) about the spam issue. As of now it seems to have been resolved.

What happened afterward was peculiar: Other influencers in $crypto lost their twitter accounts as well. Maybe as a result of collateral damage? They were either suspended or shadow banned. Here's how it all played out...

First, Twitter put an end to crypto related spam accounts

Which was a good thing because it was getting very sophisticated with a number of accounts working in collusion to sucker people out of their money. The scammers started off promoting pump and dump groups, and eventually moved on to a more basic scam asking for ETH in exchange for a 10:1 return (as seen below). The scammers used layers of social proof including a high number of likes, retweets, and comments from other accounts that acted as shills claiming they received the free reward and thanking the original scam poster.

Then other related Crypto twitter accounts disappeared...

Why were accounts like @WolfofPoloniex, @CoinImperator and @BTC4USD suspended?

I think the it's most likely similar to Facebook's policy; they don't want you to run more than one account. Sometimes people get away with this, maybe you have one for one work and one for your personal, twitter hasn't had much of an issue with this in the past. It's not like Facebook where they may ask you to verify your identity if you have more than one account. In which case they will close your duplicate account (because you're only allowed one).

Facebook intentionally differentiates personal from business through the use of Pages which they encourage you to create. Twitter on the other hand wouldn't have any way of differentiating these accounts. There is one exception where they won't allow you to create a new account as outlined in their terms and that is if you've ever been suspended in the past.

In my opinion twitter influencers that received a suspension were likely violating policies

Many shadow bans and suspensions happen as people are becoming more popular and influential on social media. Coin Lord, who recently called into the Alex Jones show to "wreck Roger Ver" lost his twitter and facebook account shortly after. Coin Lord has since reported he's been able to recover both his Facebook and Twitter account.

Others such as the WolfofPoloniex have been forced to start over.

Twitter can also limit your account by shadow banning you. Which some users may not even notice.

What is a shadow ban? It's a ban that isn't obvious to the user. After a shadow ban you can still login to your account and use it as normal, but your tweets will have limited engagement, and your comments won't show up under other user's tweets.

How can you tell if you're shadow banned on twitter?

Search for this in the twitter search box:

from:@yourusename

If you see something like this...

...instead of a list of your recent tweets, you've been shadow banned.

The final twitter limitation I want to talk about is rate limitation. This one applies to everybody...

Your actions on twitter: tweets, follows and direct messages are limited. If you send more than 1,000 direct messages in a day you'll receive a message stating the action is limited. Here are the official limitations:

Consequently if you follow too many people at once you'll be blocked from following until the rate is reset. Follows are also limited by the ratio of people who follow you back, this exact algorithm is unknown but, twitter does mention the rate changes after 5,000 follows.