I’ve been meaning to toss this one out there but have been a bit busy the past few weeks, but now that I have a bit of time I might as well share this little tidbit, for what it’s worth to you, the reader.
Late the other week, around the 2nd of August, I was made aware of the fact that the “Xadara_” twitter account was, for whatever reason, locked down, and had been since the 20th of July. No, it wasn’t my main account, but it was still one I used for good reason.
This account exists only as a “clean” feed of posts from here — it’s just a way for people to follow what I write without having to follow my much more, shall we say, active, personal account. Many people do this, as do many companies; an automated stream of content, and that’s it.
Well, for whatever random reason on the 20th Twitter decided to lock it. Needless to say, anything I wrote from that time onward, including most of the Apollo 11 articles, didn’t share there. That alone would suck, but hey, I could have just checked my email and fixed the problem quickly, right?
Yeah, that’s the thing — they didn’t email me. The account is tied directly to one of my on-site email accounts and I certainly was receiving every other email from Twitter about meaningless celebrity gossip and what others that account follows had tweeted, but not once did I get an alert that the account had been locked.
Okay, no matter – I lost like two weeks of posts being shared, but I was aware of the issue. Right, I went on to begin the process of recovering the account, hoping to learn just why this had happened. Was it because the account was automated, and it was seen as “too” automated? If that’s the case, okay, I could post more “natural” stuff to it. Did someone try to get into it, or did they do such and do something bad? I just wanted to know.
They never actually told me any reason. They just let me regain access without much issue and that was that. Indeed, I seem to have not had any issues since then, either, but as mentioned above I’ve been a tad busy.
I just want to know what the hell actually happened, if anything! I had one acquaintance on Twitter suggest it was a glitch, which could be the case — if so, however, it was one hell of one that makes me rather distrusting of the site. It’s one thing to outright violate rules, but another to have an account locked for no reason. It’s even more of a thing to not be made aware of this in any capacity — that’s my biggest gripe, that no email was ever sent to alert me to this fact, or why — that it took 2 weeks before my friend Prince Watercress even discovered this had happened!
At the time I was pretty annoyed, but I’ve calmed down now. Still, this put a bit of a sour taste in my mouth regarding Twitter, one that won’t soon wash out. Trust has been lost, that it can be used as a reliable platform to share my content and as other options inevitably come along I’ll be more apt to consider those in lieu of continued focus on Twitter going forward.
Little mistakes like this are how many of the more business-inclined users of a given service give up on it, after all… but that’s another story.
More to come, as always.
Bah, I need some music to relax with.
I remember having read that since the implantation of new rules (I think it was last year or earlier this year, unsure), a simple manual flag can trigger a lock. It was supposedly a measure to counter news that mislead! (Which at my eye seem more like an attempt to reshape the information in the way to deform even more as we are getting stuck with the “official” opinion like if it was “information” aka propaganda prone) You know, the actual panic of “fake news” that took a disproportionate proportion on the two sides of the control paradigm that represent the political in the society…
Hi Chris, I had this happen a few years ago to me and they did email me that I was caught up in the bots. But for the past year I’ve been reading things like this as people write to me about on my blog. It seems Twitter has gotten much more tougher with their RULES than ever before. I haven’t seen many get their accounts back as you have 🙂 Glad to see it’s back! Hopefully to stay.
It’s funny, getting that account back was outright trivial! It makes me wonder if I see off some kind of automated flag or a bug in their system, especially since I didn’t get an email. That’s the thing that gets to me, the lack of an email on it! At least you got one but it’s really a shame how easily it seems many, many people get punished for simple automation, or otherwise normal use.
Thanks for commenting and sharing your experience.