After taking a severe beating during last week's Democratic debate which saw a sharp reversal to his approval ratings (and boosted Bernie Sanders'), and a spate of vandals defacing his campaign offices which he blamed on Sandernistas, Bloomberg is now facing a Twitter bot scandal. On Friday, the LA Times reported that Twitter began suspending 70 pro-Bloomberg accounts in a pattern that violates their rules against "platform manipulation."

Michael R. Bloomberg's presidential campaign has been experimenting with novel tactics to cultivate an online following, or at least the appearance of one.

But one of the strategies — deploying a large number of Twitter accounts to push out identical messages — has backfired. On Friday, Twitter began suspending 70 accounts posting pro-Bloomberg content in a pattern that violates company rules.