Nick Mangwana’s Twitter account may have been restricted because of fake followers

Nick Mangwana’s Twitter account has been placed under temporary restrictions because of some “unusual activity”. This is the second time that a government-affiliated account has prompted action from Twitter. A couple of weeks ago the account for the Ministry of Information was suspended by Twitter. The Ministry’s account appeared to have been suspended because a number of users reported it for contravening Twitter’s content guidelines.

In the case of the Information Secretary Nick Mangwana, his profile displays the following when visited:

So what does this mean?

Twitter, on the site’s help centre, lays out why it puts restrictions on accounts:

• Twitter can lock accounts for security reasons.
• If the user has violated Twitter’s terms of service and rules then they can restrict the features on the account.
• If there is any suspicious or activity that Twitter detects then the account will be under temporary restrictions.

The message that is shown on Nick Mangwana’s Twitter account aligns more with the third point above. This could mean any number of things but if we are going by Twitter’s guidelines there may be a possibility as to what may have prompted Twitter to restrict Mangwana’s account.

This assumption comes by way of an application called SparkToro. The application deals with market research and audience gauging. But it also has a feature that allows users to do a fake follower Twitter account audit.

Using my own account as an example:

So my own account is in the midrange of fake followers for its size but if we then look at Nick Mangwana’s Twitter account:

How does this audit tool work?

When you enter the account that you want to audit, in this case, Information Secretary Nick Mangwana, then it gives you this readout to explain the site’s methodology:

This audit analyzes a sample of 2,000 random accounts from the most recent 100,000 accounts that follow @nickmangwana, then looks at 25+ factors correlated with spam/bot/low-quality accounts. None of these, alone, indicate a spam/low-quality account; but, when many factors are present, there’s a strong correlation with low quality.

Using this tool and Twitter’s fake account policy, and how that influences the number of followers. Then it is possible that this may be the reason why Nick Mangwana’s Twitter account may have been temporarily restricted.

But then again it could be something else entirely.