Awoke this morning to the discovery that Twitter suspended my account overnight. I’ve sent the relevant appeals out, so stand by for more details. Worried.
My Twitter account has been suspended!
This entry was written by Alister Cameron and posted on 14 December 2009 at 9:48 am and tagged: suspension, twitter. // Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. // Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
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25 Comments
you were wondering... I believe in rewarding commenters!
Did they give you a reason why at all?
Duncan.
No reason given. I know they’ve tightened up a lot on what they call “aggressive following/unfollowing”. I follow fairly aggressively, and unfollow in a “bulk” fashion on a very ad-hoc basis… but not sure, really. Certainly, I stay within “limits” and such. And while they continue with the nonsense of the Suggested User List, giving airheads like the Kardashian family many thousands of un-earned followers per day, I don’t apologize for my efforts to find followers by “aggressive” means. It’s all a big joke.
That said, I don’t hold the controls; they do, and my days may be over. Certainly, they may never explain themselves and I will never be the wiser for it. That’s what you get with Twitter… it’s so big that it almost deserves to be categorized under “global communications infrastructure” but it’s privately owned and they make up the rules as they go along. Not like there’s an ombudsman to appeal to!
I have the some concerns over Google, not least because I am so comprehensively a user of their services.
Hey Big Al
You don’t suppose it’s because of your close ties and support of Tiger Woods is it?
I’m surprised on that. One of my parody accounts got suspended; 3 weeks later it’s neither unsupsended nor canceled either, but they gave a reason in the notice.
The only advice I can give is to keep replying once a day to the notice; they don’t seem to check each day, but if you’ve got your evidence there, they might eventually notice. Worse case, email Biz.
duncan
Hi
No sweat!
Open another account on another name.
Beat the system man!
Cheers!
S.K
Alister, i thought your twitter disappeared on friday?
Also, your tweets are still in my Google Reader RSS feed
Just thought that was a quirk.I wonder if that’s cos google stores them or because twitter has left the RSS accessible and just hidden the twitter.com/user page…
Sorry to hear that Alister!
If you need a Twitter character reference, you can use me, for what it is worth 
SY
Hope you get that sorted out soon, I am missing exchanging tweets with you
PS S.K. Alister has 100000+ Twitter followers, not so easy to just start over with a fresh account!
Another 24 hours and Twitter can’t even reply to the support ticket.
I’m pissed off.
Ok Twitter got back to me today. Their explanation is
What I expected. After a week has elapsed I can request reinstatement. So I suppose this is to be taken as a shot across the bow.
Ouch, do you have another account at all?
Be strong, be courage’s yes Hope to see you back on twitter very soon before Christmas Day, twitter not the same with out you around in twitter land.
Dude, you totally hit the nail on the head with “same concerns over Google”. It is freaking scary with Google. I must admit: their services & products are superior to anything else in the information world on this planet, and so I continue to use them & depend on them for more and more everyday, and when I contemplate this, it does feel a little scary, because when it comes to governments now, you have close to zero privacy as a person, depending on how much “personal” stuff you discuss in your emails, write in unshared private Google Docs, etc etc. It’s all insane, but I guess the other side of the coin is: you can think, “what the hell…this is me, with all my mistakes/sins, scars, fears, paradoxes, and great achievements; if the government or even the whole world knows it all one day…whatever”. A little bravery.
My account with almost 7000 followers also got suspended without reason. Twitter seems cruel and inhumane.
Well said Rok
I mean really,,,,,, for the average punter who cares what Google knows.
My account has too been suspended.
Alister could you keep this post updated with how you get on?
I had almost 9k followers and was doing well in the Shorty awards.. no hope now though
Wow, this happened to me as well. After months, I just let it go – they never brought the site back up. I am now starting over and hope I can not do whatever it was that I did.
For those of you who got their Twitter accounts suspended for aggressive following/unfollowing, I’d love to know exactly what you had been doing… how many follows and unfollows a day? hundreds? thousands? Since I’ve never seen Twitter spell out what numbers trigger a red flag for them, it would be great to better understand how they interpret “aggressive”.
Sorry to hear your account was suspended. Did you ever get it back? Would you mind telling us how many followings you were churning through each day? I think that everyone with a more than modest following uses some techniques. Twitter’s idea that you should only use following if you are interested is unrealistic. If they actually believed that, they would restrict all followings to 200 users.
The problem with the “clamping down” is that they don’t actually define the limits of “aggressive following”. Some accounts seem to have been suspended for doing very little, whereas some bigger names can behave however they want. This clampdown also cements the early users who used these techniques as ‘untouchable’, and makes it very difficult for those who come later to join them with big followings. Of course Twitter do need to do something about spam, but I’d prefer them to concentrate on eliminating users who just republish the RSS feeds of others to look as if they have something to say. If you’re taking time to write about a certain topic regularly, I think it’s fair to actively look for a following.
and I’m blocked by akismet.. I’m not sure which is worse
SO annoying
Alister, This has to be an opportunity for another social network or similar service (there are actually many) to offer some sort of redundancy service.
I wonder if someone has an app that could collect and store all my 17000 twitter account followings and the underlying information, Then easily reconstitute it or have followers switch to it automatically when twitter fails me.
Through casual network collaboration I have make some genuine friends on twitter that I would hate to lose. Like yahoo was in the early days, where I still have many longstanding friendships over 15 years, I have some similar value in twitter.
But with potential to get banned I actually don’t trust twitter anymore and I don’t want to invest more time to build it up the value of this network to me or my followers. Sadly it may mean those who rely on it to get notified of updates of my blog will be gone in a second if the happens.
To give some anonymous person that power over me who on a whim may decide to change a policy and cut me off would be unacceptable risk I should not take.
And consider the possibility that someone did not like what I was writing or a competitor somehow hacked my account then spammed intensely from so it got banned. With no recourse it would fatal.
I am sure I am alone as I am now getting quite cynical of social networks value anyway. To be honesty although I still tweet and interact quite a lot I have stopped following on twitter and just let it grow organically as it wants to.
Well done with the blog Alistair. I always enjoy it and I commend you for your generosity to share your valuable work.
Gordon, a short answer.
Twitter exposes everything via it’s API (Application Programming Interface). Well all that really matters anyway.
Certainly it’s possible to create some software that would… over time… backup your tweets, your friends, your followers and most of the associated data. It would be easy to do it from now on; a bit more tricky perhaps to go back a long way in history to try and get very old tweets, etc… Not sure about that. It may actually be easy.
Sorry I can’t point to such a service, but I’m sure bits and pieces of it exist here and there, at least.
Ad thanks for your kind words too!
Peter, I should think your Akismet block is something you could take up with the Automattic guys. They’re very helpful folk!
I have 5 accounts with twitter,only had them about a week, I looked one night and four of them were suspended, due to what they call irregular activity. Now one of the accounts is to make people aware of abandoned dogs, no money or donations asked for. The other three are linked to my websites, which I don’t really push that much, I answer peoples tweets, generally just talk, about things that are going on, no aggresive following. Good god I have only got about 200 followers in my first twitter account. Frankly there is no taboo subjects no profanity, or adult content, so I don’t know what the problem is. Some of the twitter accounts that I have seen are a disgrace, just pushing products, and one that I seen was pornagraphic.
So you tell me what have I done, but Iam stumped myself
Fiona,
I eventually managed to get my account unsuspended.
What I found is that Twitter doesn’t appear to have a formal procedure for finding and banning accounts. It just has various moderators who are just normal tweeters.
In my case I had followed a chap, and then unfollowed him a few days later as he didn’t follow back. This was all it took for him to class me as aggressively adding and unadding people and he banned me.
If I’d have not added him I’d never have been banned.
If you hadn’t done anything wrong then you should be able to get yourself unbanned. Just follow the procedure on Twitter.
I am fairly new to twitter (I thought that by avoiding it that it might go away) but I wasn’t aware that accounts could be suspended so easily.
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