News from Twitter HQ on account suspensions

August 2nd, 2008 · Comments

Part 3 of my headache.

I got an email from a person at Twitter:

Hello,

I saw the thread on Satisfaction and noticed your @replies regarding your account problems. My apologies for the confusion; I’m looking into your account issues now, and I’ll be in touch with more information soon.

Thanks,
C

Wow, it’s my first interaction with a Twitter employee. While I appreciate the message, I’m still waiting to hear from the top dogs on what’s going on.

I also just saw a message from Jason Goldman, Official Twitter Rep

We’ve found that around seven accounts were accidentally suspended. They were mistakenly identified as spam; we are working to restore these accounts now.

While we have automated tools to identify spam, human review is still required before suspending accounts. Despite those safeguards, false positives can still occur and that’s what happened in this case.

I’m really sorry to those users who were affected by this mistake. We’re going to work a lot harder to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.

Has anyone else heard any news?

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Tags: Twitter

Viewing 6 Comments

Christian 5 months ago 1 point
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It's probably the number of posts you do with links vs. the tweets that are part of a conversation, but this wouldn't happen if people could flag users.

While my abnormally large head is cranking on it, they should also create "trust" and "popularity" badges - Trust = some ratio using the difference between followers and the followed -|- Popularity = some ratio using the difference between those you follow and those who chose to independently follow you (which would be those who simply found you and followed you). Then their fancy spam detecting algorythms would skip eliminating a lot of good people while people would then stop trying to follow everyone on the friggin planet.

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http://www.christiangrantham.com

Dave Delaney 5 months ago 1 point
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That's a great idea on the trust badges. As far as poring links on
Twitter, they usually enhance the topics. Hmm

Cheers,
Dave / www.davemadethat.com

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4 /people/davedelaney/ /people/davedelaney/following/ http://www.davemadethat.com davedelaney

Marc 5 months ago 1 point
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"human review"? How on Earth could anyone look at yr account and think it was spam?

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http://www.thicke.org

Dave Delaney 5 months ago 1 point
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My thoughts exactly!

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4 /people/davedelaney/ /people/davedelaney/following/ http://www.davemadethat.com davedelaney

Marc 5 months ago 1 point
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Yeah.....I'm inclined to call BS on that!

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PF Anderson 5 months ago 1 point
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Well, it's an idea, but typically trust badges have not worked on the web. (I am thinking of health information web sites.) However I also confess to feeling a bit hurt that a human looked at my site and thought I was a spammer. What I prefer to think is that someone was cranking through a ton of sites, clicking a button to say keep/pitch, and that their trigger finger got stuck on delete and they didn't know how to go back. Human error and fatigue, I hope.

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http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/etechlib