Twitter

I've been banned from Twitter.

It happened suddenly, without warning. After dinner, I loaded up Twitter for something and saw:

Your account is suspended After careful review, we determined your account broke the Twitter Rules. Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t Tweet, Retweet, or Like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts. If you think we got this wrong, you can submit an appeal.

The (indefinite) suspension email: Your account, NetOpWibby has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically, for: Violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam. You may not use Twitter’s services in a manner intended to artificially amplify or suppress information or engage in behavior that manipulates or disrupts people’s experience on Twitter. Note that if you attempt to evade a suspension by creating new accounts, we will suspend your new accounts. If you wish to appeal this suspension, please contact our support team.

I've since sent two appeals, the first basically confused and the second, inquiring which tweets fell under "platform manipulation and spam."

Twitter's reply to both appeals: Your account was suspended due to violations of our Terms of Service. After reviewing for reinstatement your account will not be restored.

I have a couple ideas as to what Twitter could possibly mean by "platform manipulation and spam." Bit of a reach IMHO, but hey.

The first is my usage of the hashtag, "#StoppableDomains." If that sounds familiar, you're probably thinking of Unstoppable Domains.

From DomainNameWire1:

Blockchain domain name company Unstoppable Domains has threatened to sue a Handshake domain name service for offering registrations under the .wallet Handshake domain name.

Basically, Unstoppable thought they could use the might of their VC dollars to bully a company and the blockchain it's built on, into submission. I happen to enjoy that blockchain quite a bit, so that's where my beef comes in.

Using the hashtag #StoppableDomains, I also exposed UD's sketchy W3DA, or, "Web3 Domain Alliance," which is actually just a vehicle for them to legitimize future lawsuits and protect pending trademarks. Did you know they filed for "Bitcoin"?2 In five countries? A company, built on Ethereum, trying to trademark the original blockchain. These folks are nuts. But I digress, my initial blog post on the topic is here.4 I just wish I took screenshots of all my tweets or put them on Wayback Machine.

When you're suspended, all of your tweets disappear. All that investigative work, gone. GG

My second theory is, maybe I mentioned too many other social networks in one tweet. I recently got an invite to Farcaster and have been loving it, so I tweeted about it, comparing it to Bluesky and Mastodon. Can you get banned over something like that? Who knows, it's Elon's world over there.

In any event, this ban feels retaliatory. I'm unable to concieve how this could happen, accidentally. I didn't have a lot of followers and certainly never had viral tweets. I'm frustrated because I've been on the site since 2009…that's 14 years ago. I'm unable to even export my data. It's gone, wiped.

spends a few minutes searching computer for possible exports

My last Twitter export is from November of last year so at least I have most of it.

If nothing else, this experience highlights the need for cultivating your own space online. Thankfully, I'm technical, so writing this blog post and SFTP'ing (shh, I know I know) it to my server isn't a big deal. I'm also not enthused about using any of my other (14) Twitter accounts (most of them placeholders for future or postponed products). I've already intended to get back to working on my paid social network5 after I launch the registry6 and registrar7 for my Handshake TLDs and now I'm motivated to work harder.

SIGH.

End of an era. 🕸️

P.S. Oh good, my #StoppableDomains tweets were in my 2022 export.8