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共辩论的中心，其实施与执行过程有时笼罩着神秘色彩。不足为奇的是，由于平台透明度有限且数据获取受限，专门研究审核动态的学术成果相对较少，尤其涉及争议性事件及其关联的平台活动。本研究聚焦两大全球政治事件——俄罗斯入侵乌克兰与2022年法国总统选举，探究推特平台上账户创建与封禁的动态机制。基于涵盖数月间1600万用户发布的2.7亿条多语推文的大规模数据集，我们识别出可疑账户创建与封禁的峰值时段，并归纳了更易导致账户封禁的行为特征。研究显示，大量账户在创建数日内即遭封禁。被封禁账户主要与合法用户互动（而非其他可疑账户），频繁滥用“回复”和“提及”功能，且以传播垃圾信息与有害内容为主。尽管我们仅能推测特定账户被封禁的具体原因，但研究发现揭示了重大事件期间平台滥用行为及后续审核的规律模式。