Twitter account suspended! [Updated]

I’ve made no secret about my enjoyment of Twitter. I’ve come to rely on it not only for the “social networking” aspects, but for news updates and sports scores; it’s also become a substitute RSS reader for me – since using Twitter regularly, I find I check Google Reader less and less, where it used to be a daily habit of mine.

Today, after dropping my parents off at the airport (they visited for the Independence Day weekend), I came home and went to the computer to see if I could track down why I couldn’t log in to Twitter on my iPhone client, Tweetie. I was greeted with this:

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.

The account I have for church (which I haven’t kept very active the last few weeks) has also been suspended, which seems most strange indeed. I’m not hopeful of getting this resolved, as many people on the Get Satisfaction forum are complaining of the same problem, and seem to get no response from Twitter support. I got several form emails after following their procedure for reporting a problem; they are useless.

Hi there, Esget!

This is an automated response to share reasons why Twitter suspends accounts for spam/abuse investigation. If you’re reporting spam, please report spam in the future by following @spam and sending us a direct message, or by blocking the spam accounts you come across, as we closely monitor blocked accounts.

Please visit your own profile page to make sure you’re actually suspended and not viewing another person’s suspended profile page– many people think they are suspended when they aren’t. You’ll know you’re suspended if you log in and see a red notice announcing your suspension on your account.

Twitter suspends accounts for Terms of Service violations or spam investigation. Please review our policies for more detailed information:
http://help.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries

If you are suspended, it’s most likely for one or more of these reasons::

User Abuse
* a large number of people block the profile or write in with spam complaints
* aggressive following
* imbalanced ratio: the number of followers is small compared to number of people following
* misuse of the reply feature
* updates consist of duplicate links and/or text
* updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
* updates consist of updates poached from others’ timelines, passed off as one’s own

Technical Abuse
* updates consist of links pointing to phishing sites, malware, or other harmful material
* a large number of accounts is created in a short amount of time
* an account is identified as belonging to a spam cluster

When this happens, we suspend the account for investigation and hide the contents from the public view in order to remove the cause of complaint.

It’s important to us that the Twitter community receives only the content they’d like to receive. While we do welcome feed-based accounts, we discourage aggressive following and other tactics that will alarm people.

If you feel you’ve been suspended in error, please reply to this email with a short explanation if you haven’t already, and don’t forget to include your user name. We’ll be in touch with more information soon.

Thanks for your understanding in this matter,

Twitter Support

I particularly love this line: “If you feel you’ve been suspended in error, please reply to this email with a short explanation if you haven’t already, and don’t forget to include your user name.” Ummm – that was the point of my support ticket in the first place, which I indicated in the items they had me select when filling out the ticket! What happens if I reply to this email? Will it cause an endless loop of death, causing the explosion of Al Gore’s Internet?

Ultimately, this will be a good thing for me. Maybe if there’s no Twitter to distract me, I could, you know, do something useful with my time, like go read a book or pray or something.

Adios, Twitterland!

UPDATE: This blog post at TweetLater (an excellent service, by the way; the owner is quick to respond, and a generous man) indicates that this is a larger problem, and hopefully will be resolved soon.

Tagged as: Twitter