Tell HN: I got banned from Twitter for literally no reason | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I got banned from Twitter for literally no reason

25 pointsmoralestapia13 comments

I built https://sci.app as my quarantine project. I manually curate videos and livestreams that I think could be of interest for the scientific community.

I wanted to have presence on Twitter, so I opened a new account with an email from @sci.app. I uploaded a nice profile picture and filled all the details (website, location, etc...). I added my phone and it was verified (as well as my email, of course). Here it is, for reference: https://twitter.com/scidotapp

The very next day, I logged in so I could tweet for the first time and my account was "suspended". That was probably a month ago, since then I tried filing multiple "appeals" through their website and had zero response. I don't even know what could I have done wrong as I literally just set up the account.

It is truly sad how draconian the internet has become and how regular people like me have no recourse to fair treatment. This is the exact kind of thing that hinders innovation, who knows how many others have gone through a similar thing and just quit it.

I had a similar experience with Twitter several months ago: signed up, followed a few accounts (five, I think? maybe six?), and... bam! Account suspended, for no apparent reason. I had not even tried to post anything. I used their process; no response. I started writing in every day, for two weeks. Never did get a response, and eventually lost interest.

Pretty lousy experience, overall. They'd send me these emails teasing me with stuff I should go read on twitter; except of course I couldn't get to them. I tried to unsubscribe from the newsletter... but you can't do that without logging in, which I could not do because my account was suspended!

I am sure the FCC could help them remember how to unsubscribe you.

They did eventually stop. I have no idea whether that's because I stopped trying to log in, or because some customer service agent actually read one of my pleas for relief.

Also was suspended because my phone went dead during 2FA. Wrote several times. They never responded. I opened a new account, no problem, but I can't remember all the people I followed and it would be nice to get my followers back. I prepared a letter to their European corporate hdqrtrs.in Dublin, but there's no mail service from where I am during the pandemic. Been looking at that envelope for three months now...

Search for "PC2Paper" which is a service that will print out a PDF and send it via snail mail for a reasonable fee. I bet there are other services like that too.

I have an American one, but they don't handle international. Part of that good old American insularity, "what's A4"? But thank you.

I see they're in the UK. Perfect! and thanks.

What’s the US vendor you use if you don’t mind me asking?

I've never had issues finding A4 paper in the US. Not sure why you'd use it, but it's there if you want it.

I had a similar experience with both Facebook and Twitter. I opened accounts on both so that I could experiment with using both for federated logins with OAUTH. Facbook banned me within thirty seconds - I didn't even get far enough to get an API token - because they said I was a robot. I tried to appeal but no luck. On Twitter I lasted until the next day when I logged in and discovered I had been banned.

But on the bright side it was a valuable lesson in dependence on third parties I'll never forget. Federated logins with social platforms seem like a good solution to a number of subtle and common problems, but if those platforms can separate me from my customers on a whim and with no recourse then the risk of using them is too great. I'd rather lose the fraction of users that never make it through validating their e-mail address then wake up and find out I'd lost all my users because some algorithm decided to and no human can be bothered to review its decision.

Similar thing happened to me except for Facebook instead of Twitter. Created an account, almost instantly suspended, scanned and sent in a copy of my driver's license as they requested and then after checking weeks later saw my account was permanently banned with no chance to appeal or know why.

Don’t rely on twitter. Build a presence on an open source and self hosted option like Mastodon.

As an addendum to this, you don't even need to self-host a Mastodon instance in order to participate in this ecosystem (the ActivityPub Fediverse). If you have a WordPress blog, you can use the ActivityPub plugin.

You can also use Write.as or WriteFreely to interact with this system.

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