My Twitter account was suspended briefly yesterday, for a supposed breach of its rules on sending out too many ‘unsolicited’ messages.
I do send tweets to a number of people who have either shown interest in a topic or are well-followed and have previously expressed interest in my blog or in social issues generally. I’m aware that I’m saying something about my ego by assuming that what I have to say on a topic is worth reading, but it’s more that I think the things I write about are too important for me to be modest and worry about whether people think I’m arrogant in promoting my articles. And I do a lot of research, so perhaps I find information that wouldn’t be generally available otherwise.
However, yesterday I wasn’t particularly active in promoting what I’d written, compared to many other days previously – days on which my account wasn’t suspended. Someone must have complained to Twitter specifically.
I have a decent idea who, as there are certain people who find some of my views very inconvenient for their agenda, but the way Twitter’s complaint process works, I doubt I’ll ever be able to say for certain. The suspension only lasted an hour or two, but it comes with a warning that you might get a longer or even permanent suspension for further ‘infringements’.
So whether it’s a malicious attempt to shut me down, or I just happened to catch Twitter’s eye, I need to enlist some help – 20 or 30 people who are used to using Twitter and are prepared to help me on a regular basis, for maybe 10 minutes each time a post is published, so that I can get the word out on these important issues rather than being silenced by either malicious ‘abuse’ reports or the random attentions of Twitter.
If you’re up for it, please say so in a comment to this post and I should be able to pick up your email address from the WordPress stats to drop you a line with an outline of what I have in mind.
Thanks in advance!