This would be desirable for research into both active & historical fake & disinfo accounts. Academics might also like it

Description

An endpoint or method that returns whether accounts has been renamed, suspended, deactivated or deleted, for both a single account and a list of accounts.

We should be able to pass in either screenname or id or idstr, or lists thereof.

Return an appropriately detailed JSON object.

We can currently only establish if an account is suspended by attempting a GET user/show & then parsing the error response codes.

Rationale

It used to be possible to do a quick and dirty check on whether an account had been suspended by using cURL on the url

twitter.com/intent/user?.......

and completing it with either screenname= or userid=.

One could then parse the response and extract the title tag to see whether an individual account was still active or had been suspended.

If one had 10 or 20 ids to deal with, it was fast and required no faffing about with code for usable, helpful data.

The page code has been changed & this is now impossible.

An alternative is to use GET user/lookup

This of course only returns user objects if the user still exists on twitter.

But we can’t know if the withheld user objects are not returned because they are suspended or because they have been deleted or deactivated by the user.

To establish if an account is suspended we have to use user/show, which for a large # of ids is expensive (i.e. we rapidly run into rate-limits) & even then have to parse the error rather than get a straightforward response.

All this makes tracking fake & disinfo accounts harder than it needs to be.

Hence the “intent” url was incredibly useful.

I suggest that the report features extend to API users. Report abuse is only available for individuals who get exposed to, click, and decide to report a tweet/account.

A lot of inappropriate content is unfortunately on twitter. Perhaps I could categorize into 4 types:
(1) inappropriate language: hate speech, harassment (bullying, sexual harassment)
(2) inappropriate image: pornography, graphic violence
(3) intention for inappropriate and harmful activities: intention to commit a crime (shooting, bomb, individual or mass threats), sell inappropriate products and services (prostitution, drugs - not debating if it is illegal or not, but I think twitter shouldn't be the platform to offer it)
(4) false information: fake news, anti-vax campaigns, fake images (generated by artificial intelligence or just simple editing)

Currently, API can report a spam account to Twitter (POST users/report_spam). Not sure if I can report multiple accounts at once or specific/multiple tweets.

My proposed solution for the report abuse API:
a. Report multiple accounts
b. Report hashtags
c. Report multiple tweets with abusive keywords

I understand there are many factors to consider what is "inappropriate". However, if you provide access for API users to report, twitter would gain more insights faster and at a larger scale to inform better decisions in taking required action and refining the community guidelines.

Twitter currently offers three levels of app permissions: (1) read only; (2) read and write; (3) read, write and access Direct Messages. These options are not granular enough for some developers, and developers would like more options to choose from.

For example, an app’s “write” permission could be segmented into more granular options: (1) write access to a user’s profile; (2) write access to a user’s network (follow/unfollow, mute, block, list modification); (3) write access to a user’s timeline, including the permission to Tweet, Retweet, or like a post.

Another example includes Sign In With Twitter: there could be an option to implement the sign in flow with “read” access only.

Here’s one example of a past forum post with a related request: https://twittercommunity.com/t/suggestion-more-granular-read-write-app-permissions/121810