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The meaning is clear, and kudos to Twitter for defining it well. But if you think through the usual meanings of the word "artificial" and apply it to this situation, you end up with some amusing conclusions.

Definition of artificial

  1 : humanly contrived (see contrive sense 1b) often on a natural model : man-made 
  // an artificial limb 
  // artificial diamonds
  2a : having existence in legal, economic, or political theory
  b : caused or produced by a human and especially social or political agency 
  // an artificial price advantage 
  // Within these companies, qualified women run into artificial barriers that prevent them from advancing to top positions in management.— James J. Kilpatrick
  3a : lacking in natural or spontaneous quality 
  // an artificial smile 
  // an artificial excitement
  b : imitation, sham 
  // artificial flavor
  4 : based on differential morphological characters not necessarily indicative of natural relationships 
  // an artificial key for plant identification
  5 obsolete : artful, cunning
Definition 1 doesn't apply: Twitter is an artificial construct to start with.

Definition 2 doesn't apply, or if it does it's a bit of a stretch.

Definition 3 clearly applies. So, "lacking in natural or spontaneous quality".

So, what "amplification" activities on Twitter have a natural or spontaneous quality? Intentional clickbait or flamebait? Using tools to schedule posts in advance to maximize engagement? Jumping on trending hashtags? Paying a person to manage a Twitter account for you? Setting up a bot to automatically post articles from a website? All of these are allowed and can be used to amplify information, but none sound "natural" or "spontaneous" to me.

The meaning is clear and Twitter's rules are (IMO) very reasonable, but there is definitely something euphemistic about the phrase. The literal phrase would be "disallowed amplification", because the only real criteria for what is considered "artificial" are Twitter's own rules for what is allowed and what is not.




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