Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Twitter Account Suspension

My Twitter account (@CatChen) was suspended for half a month.

Twitter Suspension

I woke up in the morning and found my Tweetie stopped updating. I thought Twitter was down, but it didn't recover after several hours. When I check out my Twitter web page, I saw that Account Suspended message:
This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity. If we have suspended your account mistakenly, please let us know. See Suspended Accounts for more information.


What kind of strange activity did I have? I don't know. A lot of Chinese Twitter user got suspended for no reason, and I can only guess that using Tor might lead to strange client IP activity. No matter what was the real reason for my account suspension, I got to get it recovered first.

I tried to request on the web, but I saw nobody actually processing my request. The request stayed open for two weeks, and Twitter support didn't give me any update. When I saw no hope of getting my account back, I saw a tweet from a someone who had successfully rescued his/her account from suspension. He/she said that contacting suspended@twitter.com might help, and I tried. One day after talking to suspended@twitter.com, I got my account back.

This experience is awful, but at least I got some information to share: contact suspended@twitter.com ASAP, if your account got mistakenly suspended.