Twitter informed us that providing follow features greatly increases the risk of an application being auto-sanctioned (restricted or suspended).

On March 5, 2018 our application was auto-restricted by Twitter algorithms because their system was observing elevated spam reports on Twitter accounts where SocialOomph executed a follow API call. In other words, account @user_one followed, via SocialOomph, @user_two, and subsequently @user_two submitted a spam report to Twitter to complain about @user_one.

This auto-restriction did not only impact our calls to the follow API endpoints, it prevented us from making any write operations to the API, including publishing tweets.

This restriction severely impacted thousands of our users for several hours, until Twitter Platform staff responded to our support requests, explained the reason for the auto-restriction, and then lifted the restriction.

Providing superior scheduling features has always been our core competency, and we’re not willing to retain features in the service that might, and almost certainly will, negatively impact that core competency.

Consequently, on March 6, 2018, we removed all follow features from our service. This removed the follow-back, find new people to follow, and following management features.