Twitter has suspended my account… For what?

Its no secret that I run multiple Twitter accounts. In total I have about 30 accounts running at one time. Some of them are for bots, some of them are for websites I run and some of them I run just for shits n’ giggles.

I also have a handful of twitter bots that I use for personal use. These bots are private accounts that have 1 follower – me. I use them to feed RSS feeds into them so I can keep track of various things. I have Tweetdeck running constantly and having these feeds run through Twitter is incredibly useful.

So imagine my surprise when I got this eMail tonight:

The strange thing is that nobody follows this account. The username is a bunch of gibberish and the password is a series of random letters and numbers that is almost impossible to guess. The only people who would have access to this account is me and Twitter. Even Twitterfeed doesn’t have my password since they use OAuth now. The only content that was being fed into this bot was server outage notices. The account had only tweeted once in the past week – to notify me that Slicehost was doing power maintenance on my rack.

So why exactly did Twitter suspend my account?

According to my eMail I was suspended because I was “cross-posting duplicate updates across multiple accounts”. So I jumped into twitter search and did a search of the text contained in the last Tweet. No hits. Of course there would be no hits – that account was locked and the content in that tweet is an aggregation of multiple RSS feeds fed through Yahoo! Pipes. So it wasn’t like anyone would have been feeding other Twitter bots with the same content. So what other accounts were I allegedly cross-posting to?

I am at an absolute loss as to why Twitter suspended my account.

But I won’t bother submitting a ticket given that out of the 20 or so tickets I’ve submitted to Twitter in the past 2-3 years, none have been answered to my satisfaction.

Plus I just jumped online, created another account and followed that.

So in the end, I’m at a loss as to why Twitter bothered in the first place. If I were a spammer Twitter did absolutely nothing to deter me from creating another account.

I think Twitter is starting to fall apart again…

July 11th, 2009 // Blog