It’s been a rather tough past five days for me.
Last Friday, May 26th, I got home and tried to reply to someone at around 4:45pm – and was told by my Twitter client that I couldn’t because my account had been suspended. I checked on the website, and sure enough, my @tseatah account had been suspended.
But why? I had no warning and no notification by email that it had been suspended – let alone why. All the website pointed me to what a suspended account meant.
I submitted an appeal a short time later, trying to find out what I had done that had apparently run afoul of Twitter’s rules, and then had to wait.
On Sunday afternoon I received a canned reply that simply said:
Your account has been suspended due to multiple or repeat violations of the Twitter Rules.
Please do not respond to this email as replies will not be monitored.
This was puzzling to me. Apparently I had either violated multiple rules, or repeatedly violated them? Still confused, I read back over my past tweets (as I could still see them, even though anyone else could not), and could not find anything that looked like even the slightest violation of the rules.
Again, I submitted another appeal, trying to get clarification as to what I had done that warranted this.
This morning, Wednesday, May 31st, I get a reply to that appeal:
Your account was suspended because it was found to be violating the Twitter Rules, specifically our rules around participating in targeted abuse.
Your account will not be restored.
Now I was thoroughly confused. “Targeted abuse”? This absolutely made no sense. I have never ever done such a thing on Twitter. Heck, even in any forum I’ve never done such a thing. I felt that it was clear that only the cursory of glances was being given to my appeals, and that no-one had properly looked at my account to actually see that I was innocent of what I was accused of.
So again, I file another appeal (the text of which I saved this time), once again pleading my case and politely (always politely) asking that someone please take the time to look and see that I did not make these infractions.
Then, this afternoon at ~2:40pm (before which I had already set up a new account, based on the previous ‘will not be restored’ email), I get another email:
We have now unsuspended your account. If you have any trouble logging in, you can request a password reset email here.
Please note that it may take an hour or so for your follower and following numbers to return to normal. Let us know if we can help with anything else.
So, that’s it. Nothing that explained what happened. Just a series of canned replies in response to every appeal. I’m certainly disappointed that I never found out what caused all of this, but I do consider myself extremely lucky that I was able to get the account unsuspended finally. Having searched around, I see that many other people who have been trying to appeal for un-suspension have not been so lucky.
