
Tell HN: I got banned from Twitter for literally no reason - moralestapia
I built https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sci.app as my quarantine project. I manually curate videos and livestreams that I think could be of interest for the scientific community.<p>I wanted to have presence on Twitter, so I opened a new account with an email from @sci.app. I uploaded a nice profile picture and filled all the details (website, location, etc...). I added my phone and it was verified (as well as my email, of course). Here it is, for reference: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;scidotapp<p>The very next day, I logged in so I could tweet for the first time and my account was &quot;suspended&quot;. That was probably a month ago, since then I tried filing multiple &quot;appeals&quot; through their website and had zero response. I don&#x27;t even know what could I have done wrong as I literally just set up the account.<p>It is truly sad how draconian the internet has become and how regular people like me have no recourse to fair treatment. <i>This is the exact kind of thing that hinders innovation</i>, who knows how many others have gone through a similar thing and just quit it.
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marssaxman
I had a similar experience with Twitter several months ago: signed up,
followed a few accounts (five, I think? maybe six?), and... bam! Account
suspended, for no apparent reason. I had not even tried to post anything. I
used their process; no response. I started writing in every day, for two
weeks. Never did get a response, and eventually lost interest.

Pretty lousy experience, overall. They'd send me these emails teasing me with
stuff I should go read on twitter; except of course I couldn't get to them. I
tried to unsubscribe from the newsletter... but you can't do that without
logging in, which I could not do because my account was suspended!

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chromatin
I am sure the FCC could help them remember how to unsubscribe you.

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marssaxman
They did eventually stop. I have no idea whether that's because I stopped
trying to log in, or because some customer service agent actually read one of
my pleas for relief.

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pseingatl
Also was suspended because my phone went dead during 2FA. Wrote several times.
They never responded. I opened a new account, no problem, but I can't remember
all the people I followed and it would be nice to get my followers back. I
prepared a letter to their European corporate hdqrtrs.in Dublin, but there's
no mail service from where I am during the pandemic. Been looking at that
envelope for three months now...

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Nextgrid
Search for "PC2Paper" which is a service that will print out a PDF and send it
via snail mail for a reasonable fee. I bet there are other services like that
too.

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pseingatl
I have an American one, but they don't handle international. Part of that good
old American insularity, "what's A4"? But thank you.

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voldacar
I've never had issues finding A4 paper in the US. Not sure why you'd use it,
but it's there if you want it.

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zxcvbn4038
I had a similar experience with both Facebook and Twitter. I opened accounts
on both so that I could experiment with using both for federated logins with
OAUTH. Facbook banned me within thirty seconds - I didn't even get far enough
to get an API token - because they said I was a robot. I tried to appeal but
no luck. On Twitter I lasted until the next day when I logged in and
discovered I had been banned.

But on the bright side it was a valuable lesson in dependence on third parties
I'll never forget. Federated logins with social platforms seem like a good
solution to a number of subtle and common problems, but if those platforms can
separate me from my customers on a whim and with no recourse then the risk of
using them is too great. I'd rather lose the fraction of users that never make
it through validating their e-mail address then wake up and find out I'd lost
all my users because some algorithm decided to and no human can be bothered to
review its decision.

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tssva
Similar thing happened to me except for Facebook instead of Twitter. Created
an account, almost instantly suspended, scanned and sent in a copy of my
driver's license as they requested and then after checking weeks later saw my
account was permanently banned with no chance to appeal or know why.

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wnscooke
Don’t rely on twitter. Build a presence on an open source and self hosted
option like Mastodon.

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riffic
As an addendum to this, you don't even need to self-host a Mastodon instance
in order to participate in this ecosystem (the ActivityPub Fediverse). If you
have a WordPress blog, you can use the ActivityPub plugin.

You can also use Write.as or WriteFreely to interact with this system.

