Twitter blocked my account for a tweet I did not make

It’s not clear from the post that you have the option to delete the tweet but are choosing not to. I think perhaps some of the confusion in this thread comes from that omission.

That's not how computers work. You'll mark it as deleted and then the "deleted" column (or field or whatever) will turn from false to true. No forensic evidence will be lost.

What you're doing here makes sense, and if I were at Twitter I'd be trying to help you figure out exactly what happened, on the chance that there was a deeper compromise.

You say you've been around awhile but you don't seem to understand that there is not such thing as permanent deletion when it comes to social media. "Deleting" the post in this case would only mark it as deleted and remove it from people's feeds. There is no destruction of evidence that would prevent Twitter from investigating the tweet in the future.

This has big "When the authorities get here I'll be vindicated!" energy, by which I mean: there's no forensics team heading out to the data warehouse to get to the bottom of what happened. Your tweet isn't that important and it makes sense that Twitter wants you to delete the tweet as a show of good faith.

• fetching the offending tweet via a raw/API method could, in the JSON, reveal more metadata – such as involvement of some compromised 3rd-party app with posting rights to your account

• requesting your entire Twitter archive might similarly still be available (as they offer it largely due to the EU's legal requirement), and include the offending tweet with full metadata

Requesting the latter – your full archive – without supplying any more new info (your phone number) might be a tactic with leverage given the EU-compliance dimension. (Though, it's also possible the regulators have already approved phone-number-verification as a reasonable prerequisite for such a giant personal data dump.)

For starters: it would be interesting to see what IP address the tweet was made from, whether or not it was preceded by a password change or contact with Twitter support to turn the account over to someone else.

> When something is egregious what should Twitter do if it doesn't have resources to investigate whether the tweet was "intentional" or not, if action must happen quickly to avoid problems?

Good question. That makes me wonder if they are able to operate safely at scale at all.

> And isn't a claim of "wasn't me" an easy claim whether or not it's true?

Yes. And yet: it wasn't me.

> He says "What really pisses me off is that this is fairly obviously not my fault " But I can't find out where it is so obvious. Obvious to whom?

To me, and presumably, to those who know me and presumably to Twitter employees who have access to a whole lot more data than I do.

I'm assuming you are using unique passwords per application.

How could you not notice your password being changed? I would think twitter would invalidate existing logins after a password change forcing you to log back in using the "new" password an your devices. Then again, I never used twitter.

Try to log in with a clear cache or in a private window. If you get redirected back to the page saying to delete the tweet, then you know your password wasn't changed.

Do you suspect inner job or flagging bot farm?

When taken in context it looks like an innocuous tweet but to a twitter censorship algorithm that isn't aware of the context it looks like a command for someone to die.

> @Johnrigsby128

> Replying to @AUtsogn and @KyivIndependent

> They arent bothering to train current conscripts. Some Russian soldiers say they are given a weapon and sent straight in. Learn on the job.

> 2:29 PM · May 2, 2022

(Local time where I am is UTC -5)

From an Occam’s Razor standpoint, it doesn’t add up. I was looking for more evidence here, like “At that time I couldn’t possibly have tweeted, because it was the middle of the night and I have never tweeted at night,” or “The people who were the subject of the “@“ are not people I have ever interacted with, and the tweet itself doesn’t make sense in the context of the conversation.”

The general lack of detail and a lack of putting forth a theory of what did happen, besides “I support Ukraine so I might be getting silenced” (which seems unlikely — who doesn’t support Ukraine the West? It’s not an unpopular opinion. Is this guy Russian? And silenced by whom?) — it just plays like the song “It Wasn’t Me” by Rik Rok and Shaggy.

> It's in the title.

Your claim that you didn't is in the title, sure. It doesn't sound like GP is convinced one way or another though.

Public forums, like in-person public forums, have much more context and many more barriers to being heard. In a supply-and-demand, signal-v.-noise sense, I find Twitter to be extremely low value, on the order of whatever the homeless fellow on my street shouts about (it’s usually extremely racist, homophobic, and disconnected from reality —- three traits his content shares with Twitter).

> Since there are real consequences for what you say in a public forum, it is understandable that there is an appeals process.

I don’t share the view that getting banned from Twitter is a ‘real consequence’ because I have never been on Twitter and yet, here I am, no worse for wear.

Reporters often rely on tips. It's like going fishing. If the oceans were full of fish and you wanted fish - surely spending time fishing would make sense?

Believing you weren't/couldn't be phished is a great way to get phished again...

Also, I'm not sure how you can say "there is _no way_" your account password was compromised. Can you know for certain that you haven't ever executed code which couldn't potentially be malicious or have security issues? Hell, if you use a web browser there's a non-zero chance that some website you visited was compromised to serve you some javascript which exploits a zero-day in whatever browser you use. You can say that's unlikely, but there's a lot of possible scenarios like that, and you're worryingly willing to just dismiss them all and say there's _no way_ this could be anything other than a vulnerability on Twitter's side.

That and the censorship led me to deleting my account.

If you regain even read-only access to your account, check/trim those first.

Unfortunately the Dutch telcos are not immune to being social engineered.

So it must have already authenticated you, because it knows to show you that screen.

It seems extremely odd that they would give you the option to delete the tweet, without actually giving you the ability. And if deleting the tweet was really enough, they could have simply deleted it for you and sent you a message that they did.

It's probably an exploit of some sort, hopefully someone at twitter will chime in here eventually.

edit: Wait, why not cancel your appeal, and try deleting the tweet on your own? Is it because you want twitter support to read that you never posted it to begin with?

I don't blame you, but I sort of do.

These are behemoths where you are the product.

Don't be surprised when things go awry with not the slightest care in the world by said behemoth about you.

It'd seem like a more direct title might be something like, "An unauthorized party posted using my Twitter account.". Or just, "My Twitter got hacked.".

So I guess your suspicions that there's more than meets the eye have more merit than if it would be a random poster. However, my initial reaction was still "what makes this different than any other hack?".