Social media moderation policies are often at the center of public debate, and their implementation and enactment are sometimes surrounded by a veil of mystery. Unsurprisingly, due to limited platform transparency and data access, relatively little research has been devoted to characterizing moderation dynamics, especially in the context of controversial events and the platform activity associated with them. Here, we study the dynamics of account creation and suspension on Twitter during two global political events: Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the 2022 French Presidential election. Leveraging a large-scale dataset of 270M tweets shared by 16M users in multiple languages over several months, we identify peaks of suspicious account creation and suspension, and we characterize behaviours that more frequently lead to account suspension. We show how large numbers of accounts get suspended within days from their creation. Suspended accounts tend to mostly interact with legitimate users, as opposed to other suspicious accounts, often making unwarranted and excessive use of reply and mention features, and predominantly sharing spam and harmful content. While we are only able to speculate about the specific causes leading to a given account suspension, our findings shed light on patterns of platform abuse and subsequent moderation during major events.

翻译：社交媒体审核政策常处于公众辩论的中心，其执行与实施过程却往往笼罩在神秘色彩之中。由于平台透明度有限且数据获取受限，针对审核动态特征的学术研究相对匮乏，尤其是在争议性事件及其相关平台活动背景下。本研究聚焦两大全球政治事件——俄乌冲突与2022年法国总统选举期间，系统分析了推特平台账户创建与封禁的动态特征。通过利用包含2.7亿条推文的多语言大规模数据集（涉及1600万用户、跨越数月时间），我们识别出可疑账户创建与封禁的峰值时段，并刻画了更易导致账户封禁的行为特征。研究表明，大量账户在创建数日内即被冻结。被冻结账户倾向于主要与合法用户互动（而非其他可疑账户），频繁滥用回复与提及功能，且主要传播垃圾信息和有害内容。尽管我们仅能推测导致特定账户封禁的具体原因，但研究结果揭示了重大事件期间平台滥用行为及其后续审核机制的模式特征。