My Twitter accounts were suspended and there was little I could do about it.
On Sunday, I was having a normal non-working day that involves a little social media and a lot of off-task reading online. I tweeted my way through the morning and was returning to my keyboard after a few hours of offline work after lunch.
I was logged into Twitter in Firefox with my personal account (@Kinchie). I had no idea there was a problem at this point. I composed what I considered to be a clever tweet and clicked Update when a huge red box appeared on the screen.
My Twitter account had been suspended for suspicious activity.
Twitter Account Suspended
I was shocked. No warning, no hint about why. I’ve been using Twitter for well over a year. I have blogged extensively about Twitter, written a few Twitter ebooks, spoke at a trade conference about Twitter, and have been interviewed weekly on the Twooting (all Twitter) podcast.
I know the rules, I share the rules with others. I’m not a rule breaker. I knew it had to be a mistake of some sort. But what is the procedure for dealing with this? I was at a loss.
Sleuthing For The Review Request Form
The instructions in the red box were kind enough to tell me that I could request a review of this action, and provided a link to the Twitter general help area. Mostly, I think Twitter does a decent job of writing their help and keeping it current. That’s actually good praise from me because I design and develop help systems for a living. I’m a tough judge of help systems.
The link Twitter provided in the red suspension box was not totally useless, but it was not really helpful, either. I eventually found the actual link I needed, buried almost at the bottom of the page, below the text commands, and deep within the FAQs.
Why are accounts suspended?
Accounts are suspended for Terms of Service violations or spam investigation. Read more about this here.
This took me to a specific help topic about suspended accounts, but again, it was more confusing than it needed to be. After reading it several times and clicking on several unhelpful links, I finally found the correct link to the review request page.
You would think that Twitter would have a provided a link to a specific help page focused on suspended accounts in the red suspension box rather than make us wade through their entire help structure to find what we need. Twitter, if you are reading this, that’s my gimme for you. If you want more advice, you can hire me to consult on a review of your existing help.
Sending The Review Request
Not only was it frustrating to find the page with the review request form, but when I landed there, I realized it was a general purpose problem report form and not specific to suspended accounts. Most of the instructions were not specific to my situation, and the specific details for reviewing suspended accounts are buried deep in the options.
Here’s what I provided on this form:
- A brief statement that explained my account had been suspended (with my username) and I wanted a review because I believe it was suspended in error.
- Cell phone number (because my cell phone is registered with the account).
- At the “While using Twitter, I had a” drop-down list, I selected Other.
- At the “My request is in regard to the” menu, I selected Spam/Abuse and then Suspended accounts.
- At the “I feel” text box, I explained that I felt my account had been suspended in error.
Twitter’s Automated Response
Within a few minutes, I received an email from Twitter Support (support@twitter.zendesk.com) that included general information about why accounts are suspended, along with the text of my request, and a ticket number.
I returned to the Twitter Support area to view my submitted review request online. (There was no link to this in the email, another failure.) They have tried to build a useful tool to review and update requests, but there are not fully successful. For example, when I landed there, I could see my request and the page showed me it had been assigned to someone and its status was Closed. My first thought was that the status was an error in their reporting system. How could someone have reviewed my request and reinstated my account in under two minutes? But to complete my due diligence, I had to return to Twitter to check out my account. Yes, it was still suspended. And yes, the request status was an error.
I found where I could modify an existing request (they ask that you don’t resubmit a request), and I submitted a modification that explained that my request status was Closed, but my account remains suspended. My modification was accepted and I received an appropriate email.
More Bad News
When Twitter fails, I talk to my community old school.
It has taken me nearly one hour to complete the process I’ve described so far. Extremely frustrated by my experience, I decide that my efforts are completed and I want to vent to my Twitter community. I have two Twitter accounts, and I decide I’ll use my business account to let my friends know what has happened. I log into my business account.
But my business account has also been suspended!
My two Twitter accounts have only one thing in common: my real name. They use different email addresses, different profiles, different everything. How in the world could I have crossed the Twitter abuse gods with both accounts on the same day?
Now that I know the process, it only takes me a few minutes to submit a second review request, and then modify both requests so they cross-reference each other with the appropriate ticket numbers. I don’t know if this helps, but I’m hoping it means that my accounts will be reviewed and restored faster.
Now, I’m really stymied. I could create a new Twitter account and using @replies, contact my community. But I decide to wait for that, and to go old school. I picked up the phone and called a friend to vent.
Am I Alone?
I decided it’s time to do a Google news search to see if there is a crazy rash of unexplained Twitter account suspensions. I narrow down the results to show them by date for the last hour and the last day, but there is no breaking news about a major Twitter failure. (On Monday, I found several stories that explained that I was caught in large problem, but at the time I was searching, I was way ahead of the news cycle and the search results.)
I expand my search to check the web for other people who have had accounts suspended and blogged about it. I find a lot of results for “twitter account suspended” keyword search. Enough to let me see that there is a sordid underbelly of the Twitter world where I had never ventured.
Finding Truth Among The Complainers
I was suddenly airlifted into the Twitter account suspension battle zone with nothing but my information survival skills and my wits. I know that many of the people who vocally complain about suspended accounts are actually those icky spammer people that I block when they contact me. So how do I find the legitimate, credible sources of information from people who truly were innocent and still were suspended? It seems like a needle in a haystack.
I did find someone writing about a massive account suspension on Sunday afternoon. Matt Singley (@mattsingley) was creating a petition on his blog to raise awareness. When I couldn’t access his website (his posting about the Twitter suspension situation generated a traffic spike that overloaded his hosting service), I dropped him an email and exchanged some correspondence with him. He seems like a great guy! I followed his suggestions about what to do when your account is suspended.
What Happened At Twitter?
The mystery is solved and my account is restored.
In the course of my research, I uncovered a hint of what might be the real reason for my account suspension. There were tidbits that indicated that Twitter was under a major attack from a group of hackers. I can only infer from the events and this hint that my accounts somehow got caught in the filter they used to shut down the attack. On Monday, more details about the Twitter attack appeared, and my working theory seems to be correct.
I realize that Twitter can’t communicate the full details while it is dealing with a major problem. I would rather they wait until they can say what is happening. But a hint that something is going on, that some accounts may have been suspended in error would have been nice. Later on Sunday, (after I had gone to bed), they did post some information in their status update blog.
My Community Rallies
In the meantime, the news is spreading through my community. My friend announced to the Phoenix Twitter community that my account had been suspended and a rally began. There were all sorts of supportive tweets sent to Twitter and within the community. Unable to join in, I give in for the night and decide that I’ll resume the battle in the morning. I was more than a little frustrated by my experience and vowed to blog about what I learned.
My community discovered my account had been restored while I was sleeping. I woke up to find all was right in my Twitter world again.
What To Do If Your Twitter Account Is Suspended
Based on my experience, here are my tips on what to do if your Twitter account is suspended.
- Fill out the review request form. If you cannot submit your request using this form, you can email your review request to them at suspended@twitter.com. Provide all of the information I listed above.
- Keep your cool. Things will take a while to unfold, and after you have submitted your review request, it is all out of your hands.
- Check on the status of your request, and provide any additional information Twitter staff request from you.
- Don’t submit multiple requests. It won’t help you get faster service.
- Check the Twitter status blog, the @spam account, and search the public tweet stream to see if there is a lot of account suspension activity. It won’t help to fix your problem, but it might make you feel better while you wait.
Here’s a list of Matt Singley’s suggestions for what to do when your Twitter account is suspended.
Your Turn: Have you had your Twitter account suspended for no reason? What did you do? What advice do you have to give to the readers here? Any tips and suggestions are welcome.
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Comments 19
Good step by step account of what happened! I’m glad you (and me and so many others) were restored, I hope this is the last time it happens. I suspect it’s not, but I hope I’m wrong…I guess we’ll just have to be patient and wait for the growing pains of Twitter to be worked out.
Thanks for the links, I really appreciate it!
@mattsingley’s last blog post..mattsingley: @Kinchie my pleasure, just read your post…very well written!
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 7:56 am ¶It’s a problem that started with AOL, long before they ever got anyone to the internet (@1993) – the overall notion, online, that the courtesy of pre-suspension contact is not required.
It soon seemed to became a pervasive attitude throughout the internet service provider community and here we are…Twitter picked up the same disease and continues to spread it.
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 8:13 am ¶I am so glad you got it figured out, but what a pain! I look forward to your daily twittering. They would be fools to let this happen twice.
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 8:18 am ¶Matt: Thanks for your assistance Sunday, and I’m more than happy to share you with my community!
Michael: I think that Twitter is a bit overwhelmed, which also contributes to this. I also think that if we paid for Twitter use, we might have grounds to demand better customer service. Given it is a free service, I think I’ve gotten much more than I paid for it. Overall, I only have a few specific suggestions for Twitter that would improve my customer experience with them. That’s better than many of the services I do pay to use.
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 8:20 am ¶Kelli: Thanks. I hope that by posting instructions to resolve the situation, I can help lots of people avoid the frustration of wading through their help system. Losing Twitter is bad enough!
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 8:23 am ¶I landed here following @mattsingley’s original tweet. Though this has not happened to me personally, I know several who were affected by this. I will be passing along your steps to take following a suspension and bookmarking this for future ref.
Thanks for being thorough – great info.
@PearceSmithwick’s last blog post..PearceSmithwick: @KimSherrell – Letting Armin guide me down the "Spiral" to a state of concentration – http://tinyurl.com/lo2gq8
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 8:31 am ¶Your experience with being suspended from Twitter and encountering various hoops to jump through to be reinstated mirrors what I experienced.
I actually retweeted a ridiculous spam tweet that used a hashtag incongruous with what they were spamming about. (In fact, I had found that spam tweet by searching for that hashtag.) I thought the tweet randomly using a trending #hashtag to peddle its bawdy wares was funny and that others would find it funny, too. That was what led to my initial suspension.
Apparently, when a Twitter user and their tweets are flagged as spam, Twitter’s system searches for occurrences of the text of those tweets and suspends the accounts of anyone whose tweets contain that text – including retweets.
Fair enough, but as you mentioned, there was no warning or indication that my account was suspending except being unable to log in.
That there is currently is no way for Twitter to intelligently decipher the difference between an real user (I had been using Twitter for a year and a half with no prior incident) and an automated spam account was as frustrating as trying to find how to file a report / file for reinstatement, which you have documented here marvelously.
Having checked out GetSatisfaction.com while in the limbo of not having access to my account, I can tell you that there are plenty of folks there who were seemingly unable to find the correct link. I can also tell you that Twitter seems to avoid or ignore using GetSatisfaction.com despite having an account there.
Anyway, my reinstatement was relatively swift (in comparison to a lot of folks left languishing in that limbo), but still took over 12 hours to be reinstated. An email response closing my review request and affirming (with out confirming) that it was probably the spam retweet that triggered Twitter to automatically expunge me from their good graces.
A week later, I was suspended again.
This time, a friend did some legwork and surmised that my “overuse” of a hashtag could be interpreted as a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. I had used the #robots hashtag (a long running joke amongst friends) while live-tweeting a viewing of the movie Heartbeeps!, starring Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters as robots.
Use of the hashtag was ridiculous and silly, but harmless.
I went about the same steps to get reinstated, but it actually took the aforementioned friend to advocate via tweeting with Twitter’s @spam account to get me back on board.
I didn’t hear back about my review request for well over a week. They apologized for the amount of time that had transpired since I initially made the request, but had noted that it looked like my account had been reinstated through other means and that it seemed like everything was okay now.
There was no specific mention or confirmation of why I was actually suspended this second time around.
It definitely does pay off to be patient, but it is certainly frustrating to know that anyone’s account can be suspended with no warning and no responsibility to explaining why.
Twitter is, of course, a free service, but how it handles suspensions is curiously out of step with its otherwise simple interface & cheerful posturing.
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 8:36 am ¶What a pain. You managed to make the best of it by doing some investigative journalism and providing some resources for everyone, which does not surprise me. I’m off to bookmark the helpful Twitter resource links you’ve provided. Glad to have you back on Twitter.
Kristi’s last blog post..June Wrap-Up
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 9:01 am ¶Pearce: Hopefully, my post will show up high on Google results now and help others who have no idea where to start!
Jose: Wow. Thanks for sharing your experience. I found GetSatisfaction as well, but because it seems dusty, I didn’t try using it. And I figure at the rate things change on Twitter, old news would no longer help me.
Kristi: Thanks for sharing the word about the resources. The more we all know where to look, the easier it is to help each other out.
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 10:39 am ¶I experienced the same problem – but there is a similar problem that people may not be aware of;
A lot of tweeters have also been removed from Search & People Search. If you use hashtags to reach out to people because you’re not in search your tweets wont be seen – this also effects @mentions as well.
Check to see if you’ve been blocked in search;
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=&from=mjnewham
.. replace mjnewham with your twitter ID
Martin Newham’s last blog post..mjnewham: Afternoon people — or is it evening? what time does "evening" start?
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 10:48 am ¶Martin: That’s interesting. I haven’t heard of this. Thanks for providing the link and educating us. Martin also wrote about this problem on his blog. Check it out!
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 11:18 am ¶No problem, people don’t realise they’ve been removed from search, but symptoms include;
– friends not replying (they never get your tweet)
– new followers drop in numbers
– hashtags don’t work
Its frustrating, and 2,000+ are effected that we know of
Martin Newham’s last blog post..mjnewham: #social Help! My Twitter Account Is Suspended http://bit.ly/bkJDX
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 11:32 am ¶What an experience.
I was concerned when I read about the retweet of a silly spammer. I attended a conference 2 weeks ago that managed to trend on Twitter. The hashtag was reboot11 (hash sign omitted intentionally). It turns out that scummy types latch on and use your tag with their own. Suddenly, the 600 attendees couldn’t follow the stream because of the clutter. Apparently rebootbritain had the same problem in London yesterday. At reboot11, someone was talking about the scum, so a tweet about that may have lured them out of the woodwork.
Sad to see the pride of trending something worthy drown in that junk.
Of course, thanks to you, Charlene, for all your great tweets and blog posts (which are piling up in my very big to-read list)!
Karen’s last blog post..The joy of sharing ideas
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 12:48 pm ¶Yup, you provided help to others amid your moment of crisis – that’s who you are.
I’m lucky enough for this not to have happened, but I’ll watch the hashtags a little more (i mostly use ones I just make up anyway. #timetodie)
I did have my Tweet count double what it actually was for about 10 days. It finally went down – have no idea why though.
DM numbers started to go down mysteriously yesterday by 10 or 20. It’s back up.
Lots of little things that – except suspension – don’t matter much. But put it together, it’s a little unsettling. You get the feeling all your favorites, tweets could suddenly disappear forever. …
In a world of uncertainty, wouldn’t it be nice if …
Temple Stark’s last blog post..Public Performance Anxiety
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 7:48 pm ¶What the hell…? I just saw a tweet about this and clicked over to your blog. It’s a scary situation as critical as Twitter has become, it is too big for the people behind it to support.
I had an email snafu with my account, and every ticket I opened to Twitter was just closed without any help. I got lucky and dodged a bullet, but sadly never found any way to get anyone to reply.
Keep at it! The Twitterverse would just not be the same without @Kinchie!
Posted 07 Jul 2009 at 7:52 pm ¶Karen: I figured that with all of the “celebrity pollution” on Twitter that the days of real events becoming a trending topic were over. I hadn’t heard about the situation you described. I’ve been at a conference where we used Twitter and it was such a great supplement to our interaction. I hope this problem goes away.
Temple: I see my numbers get flaky, too. In fact, when this happened, I had 899 followers and I wondered if I had been suspended for some follower/following ratio problem at first. If reaching 900 followers was significant. Now, I consider my numbers to be ballpark estimates, and not physical world realities.
Jeff: I think Twitter’s reporting system has a problem with the displayed status. I wonder if they know about this. I’m hoping someone with access to Ev (or someone else inside Twitter) might share a few snafus with him, just so it is on their radar.
I really wondered if I was going to have to start all over on Twitter with new accounts. That was unnerving, to say the least.
Posted 08 Jul 2009 at 5:52 am ¶My account using Firefox said it was suspended this morning, but on Chrome i can sign in just fine!
Posted 21 Jul 2009 at 8:32 am ¶That is really interesting, David. I haven’t heard of any suspension related to browsers. Have you tried to log in using Firefox since you tried using Chrome?
Has anyone else had similar results to David?
Posted 21 Jul 2009 at 10:03 am ¶I had the same problem. But in my case I think I was deemed guilty of follower churn. Apparently if you unfollow a large group of people then follow another large group within a short period of time its a violation of the TOS. So for example, on a business profile I follow then expect to get followed back, if I’m not then I unfollow… rinse and repeat.
Now that I understand the rule, I still have a problem because I dont understand the limits of the terms. For example, there is no number or time frame provided and it seems that the rule is a bit ambiguous.
Posted 19 Aug 2009 at 1:12 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
[...] Update 9 July 2009: It seems Twitter suspended a LOT of accounts recently. Charlene Kingston has the details and how to get off the suspended list if you get on it: http://blog.crowinfodesign.com/2009/07/07/twitter-account-suspended/ [...]
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