Earlier this month I’ve been changing the passwords of four of my Twitter accounts in a short span.
It’s not just quick, but too quick, and that’s what would unwittingly lead to the start of an ordeal on the very next day.
Twitter’s automated system may have caught the abnormal activity and promptly flagged and autosuspended accounts @cybanakinvader, @cyberahsokatano, @juche_school1, @omawiisecurity, @eu_court_press and @cour_ue_presse. Now if you’re quite familiar with me for a while you might notice that all of my prank accounts that ended up on BBC and ZDnet got affected.
I filed several appeal tickets to Twitter Support for those accounts respectively and even contacted some Twitter staffs directly with help from my followers, and few days later they replied that they found me in violation of “creating serial and/or multiple accounts with overlapping use cases”, “Cross-posting Tweets or links across accounts”, and “Aggressive following, particularly through automated means”. This may have to do as factors which led to their automated system suspending those in this case.
Before that I supposed that a certain young-aged individual from Canada who uses a script to mass report anybody with 400-500 accounts might be the culprit here and more often than not he would @ people being targeted to but luckily this isn’t what happened.
After I chose my main account for restoration (see above), I would end up with a more grueling wait in which I would obsessively google terms like “how to appeal Twitter suspensions” however the best of it is I unwittingly came across tales of how many people across the world have their accounts permanently locked out after entering the “correct” birth date after registering a false one when they were younger.
If you think that bad EU laws won’t affect the whole world then please think again as the mass birthdate lockout is precisely due to the GDPR’s implementation. This is a serious issue pertinent to all of you.
As you can see here the automated system methodology currently used by Twitter to ostensibly detect and lock/suspend hacked accounts is very far from perfect when it caught up what it shouldn’t. This is precisely why Article 13 in its current form must be opposed.
I have a backup account (@cyberanakin) to use in case of that but Twitter has tighten its rules regarding evasion of suspension so the appeal form is the only way to go for that moment and after continuous pressures by me and my followers (especially @loondale and @soronsen) to expedite the appeal process, the ordeal was finally put to an end when Twitter unsuspended my main account.
People like me might have the privilege to alleviate some aspects of the bureaucratic appealing process with the help of fans/followers but what about the rest of ordinary folks? This is going to get way lot worse if #Article13 passes next year as the internet will no longer be as vibrant as before.
On the other hand the #MAGABomber guy was left alone by Twitter staffs before the attempted mail-bombings despite numerous threats against numerous figures so I’m gonna tone down my Twitter activities a bit to protest their incompetence.
First I’ve set up a chat room on my subreddit for all of my followers and friends to stay in touch although you would need to switch to new reddit interface to do that.
Next the Jester has created his own Mastodon instance counter.social where you can join with me too.
Finally, I have made an account on Plurk. Bye bye @cyberahsokatano.
May the force be with you.
Cyber Anakin 