In an ironic twist of fate, a number of people related to O’Reilly Media, as well as others guilty of using Twitter to express thoughts and commentary about and from the Gov 2.0 Summit, have found their accounts suspended this morning due to unspecified ’strange activity’.
That includes prolific (and real) Twitter users such as Tim O’Reilly himself, but also other accounts related to the publishing and event company, such as O’Reilly Radar’s Brady Forrest (@brady), authors like Sean Power (@seanpower) and generic accounts including @w2e (for the Web 2.0 Expo) and @gov2events.
Updated: most accounts that were wrongfully suspended are being reinstated one by one now.
Mosey along now, nothing to see here
Published author and blogging expert Debbie Weil also got banned from Twitter for the time being, and assumes it has something to do with the fact that the hashtag #gov20e was a trending topic yesterday and may have caused Twitter to automatically suspend the accounts of several users who have been keeping busy tweeting about and from the event using the identifier. Well in that case at least the company’s trying to combat spam.
It’s most likely something like that, or it might be related to the downtime and other issues that has been plaguing the service for some time now.
Either way, Twitter has a number of support tickets coming their way today.
(Thanks to Sean for letting us know)
I’m so glad they’re censoring these things like they’re supposed to. HERE’S TO ROBIN, KING OF THE CENSORS!
I’ll let you figure this one out by yourself.
Tell your mom I said hi.
Twitter is really an effective social medium. Taking immediate actions is best rather than just having effective measures to control spam and ban unnecessary issues. Twitter functions with the
former, really it is appreciable. Well done!
Surely they’d have safe guards in place so that if a user has xx criterion filled they have to be manually suspended? I mean really, allowing your system to suspend people like orielly is stupid.
Twitter really does have some problems they should sort out.
Now if they could only censor Paul Carr’s attempts at humour
Are you kidding? He’s at least as funny as Carrot Top. Maybe he’s just Gallagher funny.
Carrot Top was never funny
I think I stopped receiving Tweets at around 3:30ish AM EST. Go figure!
Well . . I suppose it’s very topical for the book Alistair and I wrote. Raah.
I don’t use Twitter myself, but it’s absurd that one company controls a service that so many depend upon (and does this so badly).
who depends on twitter? get real now.
douche’s like MG do.
Let’s see if retwitting this has the same effect.
Wow i wonder the same thing , what if we retweet this ?
people can spout conspiracy theories galore, faked moon landings, grassy knolls, 9/11, etc but talking about gov2.0, that just crosses the line?
Yep, my @mlsif account was suspended this morning. I was tweeting from Gov20e yesterday and am at the Gov 2.0 Summit today…Bizarre. Thanks for reporting on this.
Ban Glen Beckkk too please…
It does not matter the main issue is why suspension. With everything supposedly so open in our government this should have been one of those that we could tweet about.
Again i must be lost on this but it makes no sense
I think our accounts were suspended because spammers had glommed onto the hashtag and legit accounts were suspended in the blanket suspending that was implemented to stop the spam.
I tweeted from the event and was suspended, and didn’t use any hashtags, FWIW.
funny – the last tweet from oreilly i read was something along the lines of “twitter is becoming my external memory – to make sure I don’t lose anything I use backupmytweets.com”
and not a minute too soon!
Its just feature in the cap, twitter is facing lot of issues.
Ok if I just post all of my tweets here until my account gets reinstated?
My account (@sradick) was hacked and suspended as well….I’m at Gov 2.0 Summit now and many of us here are in the same boat.
i am in Grand Marais, MN and everything is running well here
I was at the conference yesterday. Just after lunch a bunch of us started noticing spammers using the conference hashtag, #gov20e. We started alerted others to the problem, but heard nothing back until this morning when a bunch of our accounts, mine included (@weinberg81 and the corporate account I manage @OpenAmplify).
I’ve submitted a ticket for both but have heard zip from Twitter.
Hopefully they will make a statement and retract, fixing the problem.
Dave
Woohoo! Both our Twitter accounts have just been re-instated after curiously being suspended due to participation at #gov20e yesterday.
The staff at Twitter brought us back “from the dead” after only 5 hours.
@weinberg81 and @openamplify are once again live
Dave
This is really unfortunately. I (@JosephPorcelli and @NeighborTweet) run a nonprofit called Neighbors for Neighbors, Inc (www.neighborsforneighbors.org) and I had to raise funds from our membership to be here in DC for this conference. Since my accounts have been suspended, I am not able to participate in the online discussion – which is I where much of my learning takes place as well as opportunities establishing my nonprofit as a leader in the Neighborhood Organizing/Government Collaboration space. Bummer.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks!
This weekend for the first time I saw extensive spam in twitter trending topics. Twitter does have a real issue on its hands. I kept looking for was a way to flag spam tweets. That alone would help them not sensor legitimate tweeters.
They also have to think about how they figure out which users have had persistent identity over time (on twitter) and across the web and if they can do this they will know which accounts are unlikely to be spamming.
Yep, my account is suspended as well after tweeting here at the conference. Apparently account suspensions are for up to 30 days…sigh….
Tim will go crazy if he can’t tweet for that long.
My account was hacked/suspended as well. Please can I have it back now?
Here at Gov 2.0 Summit today, and oddly, they have yet to even mention the problem.
My account was suspended this morning as well, but I’m not connected to the Gov 2.0 Conference at all (except for in the Kevin Bacon kind of way).
At least I know its not just me!
Same thing happened to many of us who attended the Building Perfect Council Websites conference #pcw09 in July. Most of us were reinstated a few hours after we complained. At least one was suspended for a couple of weeks.
I’m suspended as well – was tweeting from the Gov 2.0 Expo yesterday after a long quiet stretch. Glad to let my inner spammer stretch his legs…
So their logic is that EVERYONE who uses that hashtag too much are spammers? How about just making that hashtag not searchable in the search results, limiting the effectiveness of the spam, while you investigate individual accounts to suspend? That would have been a better tactic than shutting down legitimate accounts, while at the same time minimizing the effect of the spam.
I’d bet somebody hacked the twitter accounts of people who where logging in while there where there.
But it’s all speculation. Anybody actually ask Twitter?
This is what happens when you use a private platform such as Twitter or Facebook.
Since RSSCloud will soon be spreading like a virus across the net I’m staying well clear of Twitter.
Want a real open platform?
Wordpress+FOAF+RSSCloud+OpenSocial
START OF RANT
How do you think Twitter and Facebook pay their MASSIVE operating costs? Do you really think that investors throw money at them without a profitable reason?
You sell your souls like sheep, then happily read about it on Techcrunch. Everyday your lives are one day shorter and your privacy belongs to people you’ve never met.
Twitter can censor themselves for all I care.
END OF RANT
I lost access to @digiphile, which I used quite a bit yesterday on that #gov20e hashtag — but also to a work account and third account that I updated from that location. It would appear, in other words, that it’s not just using the hashtag but location-based suspension. Knocked @TimOReilly off, who was a Verified User, is probably the biggest news here, though my own frustration feels important to me, naturally, as I can’t participate in the Summit here on Twitter. Tim lost 90% of his followers in the process. We’ll see how I emerge from the experience.
I’ve got the same problem, we sent a tweet from @twilio about looking forward to the Gov 2.0 Expo (our CEO is there – @jeffiel, suspended too) and now that account and all the others which I updated from that IP address are shut down. I should note that this doesn’t appear to be location based relative to Washington D.C., as I am tweeting from San Francisco.
I’m curious to see how we emerge as well, it isn’t that there aren’t plenty of other places to communicate, but it is a little crazy to watch some of the most influential people silenced in the name of controlling spam
Yep, me too. Looking forward to having my account back up. Feels a bit like losing my PDA or something: hindered in my ability to collaborate, share and participate today at Government 2.0 Summit. Using alternate account for now. #g2s
Speculation from those sitting around me, who were suspended, reinstated, and suspended again, was that it might have had something to do with the mass of hash-tagged tweets originating from the same IP location. I guess it’s a trade-off between that and our excellent wireless access/plethora of power strips, which every conference involving stuff 2.0 should have available.
I know “conspiracy” has become cliche’ But this is just another uneasy, lingering, subtle reminder of what is happening to OUR internet and OUR world.
Twitter is weak.
They get hacked.
They go down (constantly).
They block/suspend without reason.
Am I the only one who is absolutely sick of all this?
I agree with Jim. RSSCloud will put an end to this madness.
God, I hope rssCloud will!
Twitter suspends our Gubernatorial Twitter account
http://twitter.com/alexhammer
http://hammer2010.com
and their customer service is (thus far) non responsive.
My account was suspended as well. I was at the event.
Not only is the suspension nonsensical and annoying, the ticketing system is sending contradictory and confusing messages to me, saying that my ticket is “closed” and that my problem is “solved”.
Each ticket results in an email thanking me for my feature request.
Very annoying.
@johnwonderlich on twitter (sort of)
I’m back up on all accounts. I missed the morning but cranked out an excellent account and was as present as could be for the discussion between @markoff, Jack, Vint Cert and Tim Sparapani. The initial issue may have been an overreaction but the resolution is satisfying. No loss of account data or followers.
My account is back as well.
As others have said, this is a great example of why we cannot allow a single point of control to our free speech. Whether the cause of the account suspensions was accidental or not is ultimately not as important as this serving as an example of why a distributed system, like rsscloud, is needed.
Freedom of speech only covers government actions – it does not extend to private companies.
and i’m back . . . which means I can now keep up with @donttrythis and @stuffmydadsays while sitting here at the conference
I don’t think it has anything to do with the hashtag. I had my two accounts suspended as well as a handful of clients- all at the same IP address. I think they put in an IP address spam filter of sorts. Soooo if you are all at the same conference then there’s a ton of twitter accounts all tweeting from the same place. It would probably stop most of the bots I was encountering but obviously it backfired.
All of my accounts are back up as well (http://twitter.com/dslunceford and http://twitter.com/govtwit), but would really like to see Twitter at least address why they took down so many “innocent” accounts in their spam blocking attempts. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was at the O’Reilly event this morning, but strangely, the mass suspension wasn’t addressed from the stage.
Mine was one of the accounts that was banned last night. I thought it was just because I was furiously covering the #gov20e convention and had too many links!
Twitter will also sandbox your account if you complain to @ev and @biz about the rotten service (which it was — rotten — about two months ago, and I did complain).
Go to Search Twitter and search for my account — mikecane — you won’t find a single tweet that *originates* from that account.
This makes my account invisible to any firm that compiles Twitter statistics. It prevents me from searching for a past tweet. It prevents me from engaging in weekly Twitter conversations around hashtags that use a search-based service such as TweetGrid. It also prevents my tweets getting to people unless they are using certain clients.
And businesses are expected to *trust* this service?
If they don’t treat everyone equally, what will they do to competitors of their friends? What if GOOGLE acted like this?
There should be no surprise here. Self hosted is the only way to ensure your data is safe. It’s certainly not safe with Twitter. Or any other micro-messaging/SN service.
Twitter combating spam suspending valid accounts? If the accounts got suspended because they were trying to fight the spam then I know why there is so much spam people get on twitter. They really need to re-consider and should take some classes from MattCutts or they are just wasting their time and resources.
o ca-mon — it IS their site! they can censor whom ever they want. @Twitter is not the “Internet” as most of u coffee drinkers like to think! .. there’s another 100 billion or so pages to discover ..!
B
Maybe we need to push a way for users to flag spam. That way the users control it, and not some poorly designed algorithm.