Mark Forscher

Yesterday afternoon I logged in to Twitter to see the following alert message from twitter:

Account Suspended. This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity. If we have suspended your account mistakenly, please let us know. See Suspended Accounts for more information.

“Strange activity”? Yesterday was a Twitter day like any other: a few tweets and a few new follows. What is really strange here is that my twitter account was suspended without clear cause. There seems to be a long history of this kind of thing happening to other people.

From reading the thread, I can only guess that someone objected to the content of a recent tweet, flagged me as spam or as abusive content, and that Twitter’s way of handling reports of spam or abuse seems to be suspend the account first and ask questions later.

If this is what actually happened (I still don’t have an answer to my support ticket) this approach clearly protects Twitter, a company with limited resources, and may be one practical way to not be held liable for abuse of their service. But this is just poor customer service. Yes Twitter is a free service and I’m very understanding when there is downtime. But as users invest time and energy into the service, Twitter’s reach and depth grows, and the way this type of situation is handled by Twitter becomes more important.

When I logged in this morning my account was magically active again. My support ticket with Twitter is still open and I’m left without a clear answer of what happened. Through this experience I learned that my Twitter account can be suspended arbitrarily at any point in the future. I guess I should be thankful that the suspension was lifted in less than 24 hours?

Update: Looks like this was a much wider problem that happened yesterday. Twitter says it was “human error”:

Earlier today, we accidentally suspended a number of accounts. We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accounts—we expect this to be completed in the next several hours. One additional note: some the accounts suspended were using the third-party site Tweetlater. However, Tweetlater is not to blame for these suspensions nor is it in violation of our Terms.

(thanks for the link Alcalde!)