Twitter account suspended
Posted on May 31, 2009 by Chris
So the website I run, TravelGator, finally gave Twitter a try this week. I’d been holding off doing anything on Twitter as I honestly didn’t get the attraction (plus I had been lazy). So I finally decided, given the ridiculous amount of buzz about this company, to give it a try.
As a sort of an experiment (and again because I was lazy) I didn’t really do any research on the “right” way to use Twitter and just barreled in to give it a shot. I quickly learned that it can be really addictive when you get into it. I didn’t get much from the people out there who were updating me on the type of breakfast cereal they had in the morning but the ones who were posting links to really interesting travel information they had found online were very much appreciated. Most of this information I found very interesting myself and I never would have found it on my own.
In this way, I was using Twitter as a sort of personal search engine for a specific topic area - as most of the people I was following were in the travel business in some way or otherwise interested in travel as a topic.
The other thing I did was I started to contribute my own interesting links, some to content on TravelGator content but also to a whole range of blogs and other sites out there that cover travel. I also “re-tweeted” links that others sent out that I found interesting.
So…all good right?
Apparently I made a bunch of newbie mistakes according to the powers at Twitter.
- I followed too many people right off the bat - even though everyone I followed looked really interesting based on their past tweets and I wanted as rich an update stream as I could get. Apparently you are only allowed to follow 2000 people before you need to also have the number of people following you rise to a similar level. I got cut off from following new people around 1200 or so.
- I posted too many links and not enough personal updates. This one I find weird…isn’t blogging all about links to other things (i.e. the hyperlinking thing that started the web in the first place). If so, shouldn’t we expect microblogging to be based on the same basic premise? I really didn’t care about the hypothetical breakfast cereal choice but the links everyone were sending out were gold.
- I did something else that they didn’t like although I have no idea what.
Anyway…after three days of posting (about 200 posts) and following other people (about 1200) and having people follow us (about 400 and rising rapidly) the account got suspended.
I’ve posted to their help forum and sent them a pleading email but my hopes are not high that they will rectify this situation. Based on other chatter out there on blogs by people who have had the same thing happen to them I expect Twitter’s spam algorithms are pretty poor so they suspend a lot of valid accounts and hence customer service is way overwhelmed. We shall see though. If not, I’ll create another account in a few days and try again.
They did send us this nice email:
This is an automated response to share reasons why Twitter suspends accounts for investigation. If you’re contesting suspension, please reply to this email and include the information requested at bottom if you haven’t already.
Twitter primarily suspends accounts for Terms of Service violations or spam investigation. (Please visit your own profile page to make sure you’re actually suspended and not viewing someone else’s suspended profile page.) 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. Unless we’ve advised you otherwise, your account may be suspended for a minimum of 30 days while we investigate. Accounts in violation of the Twitter Rules or Terms will be permanently suspended.
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 will do our best to get back to you within 30 days.
Thanks,
Twitter Support
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