Twitter Suspended My Account!

Yes, if you’re trying to find me on Twitter and you can’t, it’s because Twitter suspended my account. No, I did nothing to violate their Terms of Service, nor have they alleged that I have. Rather, something recent must have accidentally tripped some automatic alarm system, and their computer automatically locked me out of my account.

I’ve been using Twitter for years now, and I’ve even developed some real (though virtual) relationships that started via Twitter.

I really wanted to do a little tweeting before bed tonight, because catching up with my Twitter friends can be uplifting. But I can’t now. So instead of doing that, I’m blogging about why I’m not. And that sucks. Especially since I recently followed a bunch of other Holly Lisle fans, including other active writers, and their tweets are really interesting.

And maybe that’s what set off Twitter’s computer. That’s the only thing I can think of. I noticed that after I followed them, a few people “blocked” me, something that somewhat surprised me, because I’m not a spammer, and if they were interested in keeping their tweets private, they would have made their profiles private. I know that Twitter has some automated trigger such that if a certain unspecified number of people block you (within a certain unspecified period of time?), Twitter will automatically suspend your account.

But all I did was to follow their public tweets, which is how you meet new people on Twitter. It’s always been that way. I know, because I’ve been on Twitter for years. While I understand that new people coming on Twitter may get annoyed, especially since there are spammers who follow a large number of people, just to get a large number of followers, and then these spammers don’t actually pay attention any of their friends’ tweets. And so I understand why some people may get bitter and want to lash out at anyone who they don’t know who follows them.

But you see, I’m not one of these spammers. I actually do pay attention to my Twitter friends’ tweets. Not all of them, all the time, but when I log onto Twitter, I actually do participate in the conversation. I’ve been doing this for years. And if Twitter had looked at my account longevity, they would have known that I wasn’t a spammer.

If their algorithm had a catch for account longevity, it wouldn’t have falsely triggered, as it did, and I would be tweeting with my friends right now, rather than complaining about how down in the dumps I feel about being cut off from them.

Oh well… -TimK

P.S. I’ve signed up to Plurk, and I’ll be making friends there, too, now. Redundancy, you know.

UPDATE (11:04 PM EDT) – Twitter has unsuspended my account. They gave no reason for the suspension, and the support ticket I filed is still “awaiting assignment to a help desk operator.” Even so, I’ll be looking into using Plurk or some other service as a backup for Twitter in future.