I had the shock of my life today when I logged into my Twitter account and got the notice “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.”
With my last tweet being “Working on spreadsheets. Must stay away from Twitter until I’m done. MS Excel for Mac, don’t you dare do anything funny or heads will roll!”, my first reaction was: it must have been the anti-MS (Microsoft) sentiment that did it.
But after a bit of googling and less-hysterical more rational thought, I realised that my last tweet must have triggered some auto-response that classified it as a direct threat to someone. You see, one of Twitter’s rules specifically states: “Violence and Threats: You may not publish or post direct, specific threats of violence against others.” Obviously, their system needs a bit of fine-tuning.
I’ve already filed a ticket to contest the suspension and am currently waiting for a reply from Twitter, all the while trying to fight off Twitter-withdrawal symptoms. It feels so debilitating not to be able to tweet a link to an interesting article I’ve come across; or upload a photo that might be of interest to my followers; or post an observation that does not require a full blog post.
It’s only been a few hours and I’m already feeling lost without the stream of news updates from Al-Jazeera (for international news), StarOnline (for Malaysian news), Time Magazine (for current events) and InquirerDotNet (for Philippine news).
I miss the stream of information from my favourite photographers, photography-related resources, other travelers, and travel-related services.
I miss getting direct feedback and comments from my favourite airlines (KLM, Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia) and from my home ISP (P1W1MAX).
I miss the trivial details of what’s going on in my friends’ lives — at least the portions that they choose to tweet about.
In the meantime, I’ll sit tight and hope that Twitter replies soon (blame it on the huge time difference between Malaysia and the US). Otherwise, I’ll just have to create a new account and start from scratch all over again… *sigh*
Tags: Twitter
March 17th, 2010 at 23:16
What?! That’s why you’re not twitting lately. I actually visited your page just now and it has a suspension notice nga. =(
Now I’m reviewing my tweets, heehe. I couldn’t believe that I’m already consumed by Twitter. I loved how the information reaches real time especially when there’s an issue of national interest. It’s much better than waiting for the feed from the radio or television.
I hope your account will be reactivated soon.
March 18th, 2010 at 06:18
WitsAndNuts: Real-time info is irreplaceable indeed. I’m so disappointed Twitter hasn’t responded in anyway. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even get a letter from them about the suspension so everything that I’m stating here is pure conjecture on my part.
March 18th, 2010 at 10:23
Hi Mimi, just hopped over. ;)
Twitter also seems to be having other problems for the past days. I’ve been encountering a number of error messages when I log into my account. Sometimes I can log in but when I post something, it registers an error. It’s irritating but what else can you do but just keep trying to log in. Checked their Tumblr and it seems they’ve got their hands full tracing the source for these problems. Maybe that’s why they haven’t responded to you yet.
Echoing witsandnuts, hope your account gets restored soon. :)
March 18th, 2010 at 14:02
Hi Jayme! Thanks a lot for yr support. But you’re right about Twitter. I also encountered a lot of problems this morning when I created another account. (Yes, I was THAT desperate hehe.) But I guess all’s well that ends well coz my account’s been restored already. Do drop by again soon! =)