Twitter Account Locked How To Unlock

[Octaviano Collars]

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I found this tweet funny, so I replied with the following. Below is a screenshot of the tweet because I had to delete the original tweet to fix the violation and prevent my Twitter account from getting banned permanently.

With 3 minutes from detection to email, I guess detection took less than 1 minute and flagging and other things took the remaining time. That is blazingly fast. Kudos to the Twitter team on that. I guess what Twitter violation detection algorithm SLAs are.

Unified communication across all devices. The violation notification email and pop-up on the Web and Twitter app for iPhone had consistent and clear messaging. Here is the screenshot of the email.

Moments later, at 9:31 AM, I got a confirmation email from Twitter stating that my appeal had been successfully submitted. Still, if I would instead blindly acknowledge my violation, I could get full functionality sooner. I decided to wait.

I did learn a lot about the complexity of the Twitter appeal and violation process. I have sympathy for the Twitter team. Keep up the good work. You have a long way to go to make Twitter the platform we all want to hang around.

You dont want to open source rhe code because it makes Twitter vulnerable? How lame. Security through obscurity is a futile endeavor, and open sourcing the algo doesn't mean we need the whole codebase. You're being a corporate suck-up. And it's duct tape; not ducktape, you lame duck.

Let me save you some time and effort before you head to the comment section and tell me my command is wrong, and it should be a \u2018s/all/.\u2019 I was not trying to be technically correct. I was trying to be funny. In retrospect, \u201CSudo kill -9 1\u201D would have been a funnier tweet \uD83D\uDE02

The Twitter violation algorithm took 3 minutes to detect, flag, lock my account, and send me an email. There is no way a human can read tweets so fast, so it\u2019s a violation detection bot army doing at work. Doing this at scale means all tweets are following some fast regex, and likely, an AI is getting trained and making decisions. I plan to deep dive into this topic and share it in a follow-up post.

The email doesn\u2019t tell me which tweet caused the violation. I am not a power tweeter. It was easy for me to figure out which tweet triggered the violation. But this is a serious communication gap for people who tweet a lot. How does one determine what caused the violation and prevent a future violation without any information?

Unfortunately, there isn\u2019t much good here to talk about. The white box (in the gif below) is supposed to contain the screenshot of the tweet but is empty. The page tells you the number of tweets that you must delete, but it doesn\u2019t say which tweet \uD83D\uDE21

On an important side note, the red \u201CDelete\u201D button doesn\u2019t delete the tweet. It\u2019s just an acknowledgment of violation. You still have to delete the tweet manually, or it can get re-flagged.

At this point, I have only one option, i.e., acknowledge that I violated the terms and accept it. I can\u2019t re-appeal, and there is no way to figure out what caused it. Also, I don\u2019t know how many strikes I get. Do I get 1, 2, or 3 violations before my account is locked forever?

Before diving into recommendations for the Twitter team, let me quickly close this up by saying that I did acknowledge the violation and deleted the tweet. While I can access Twitter, I can\u2019t engage with it.

So I am currently on a 12-hour timeout which is stupid. If I were to cause a violation intentionally, I wouldn\u2019t go through the process of appealing and acknowledging it and then doing it again. This ban seems unnecessary, but hey, what do I know.

Based on the above experience, this may seem contrary. I do want to understand the violation and the appeal process. But I don\u2019t want to read Twitter\u2019s code to understand it (I have my own code to read).

Moreover, as anyone who has built similar distributed systems, it\u2019s not like all code sits in one repo. It\u2019s multiple repos distributed and connected with APIs and ducktape. And even if Twitter were to open-source all the code, 99.9% of people won\u2019t read it. And the 0.1% who will, will summarize it and create a super-abstracted Twitter thread about it.

Today was an exciting experience. My novice joke almost resulted in a permanent ban. Without the retro, I would have not realized that my Linux skills were dangerous. TBH, anything with \u201Csudo\u201D as a prefix is dangerous.

I refuse to give Twitter my phone number, because Twitter is an advertising company and would gladly sell it given the chance. They claim the phone number is only for "security", but we've seen a number of instances in the past when this trust has been violated anyway. Thus, I can't login and delete the tweet, even if I wanted to delete the tweet, which I don't (yet). At this time, I remain locked out of my account.

Twitter is currently holding my account hostage until I give them my phone number (and then presumably delete the "offending" tweet). Thus we are at an impasse. I appeal to the internet to publicly shame Twitter and get my account unlocked.

Despite Twitter's claim in the screenshot above that my account would be restored to full functionality in 12 hours, that did not happen. The next day, I was still getting the phone number demand every time I tried to login. A few friends noticed this blog post in my RSS feed, but it wasn't getting much traction. And I started to worry that I wouldn't get much sympathy from people who had already willing shared their phone number with Twitter. As my hope faded for some kind of deus ex machina, I reluctantly decided to share my phone number with Twitter in order to restore my account, which is important to my business. It's important to remember though what I'm giving up in privacy: see for example "Twitter admits it used two-factor phone numbers and emails for serving targeted ads", which also details other lapses by Twitter (as well as Facebook). None of these big tech companies can be trusted with our personal information.

My Twitter account is now fully restored, with the warning that I may be permanently suspended if I happen to accidentally do something else in the future that Twitter mistakenly considers to be a violation of their rules.

If there's a lesson here, I think it's that we're all too reliant on big tech companies such as Twitter. Individually, you can take steps to own your content, like I've done here by publishing my own blog on my own domain and a publicly accessible RSS feed. Yet in the end it doesn't matter, because RSS readership is very low nowadays compared to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. You can try to be decentralized, but if your decentralized content isn't linked on the big centralized networks, it might as well not exist. You can still be effectively censored and silenced by the big tech companies regardless of what you do. If your personal and/or professional network is on Twitter, you can lose it all in an instant, arbitrarily, for no good reason, and with no real appeal. (Remember that my "appeal" was purportedly reviewed by a human at Twitter and still rejected.) I would urge everyone to reconsider your reliance on Twitter, and reinvest in decentralized options such as blogs, RSS, and email. Collectively, we need to protect ourselves from the unchecked, undemocratic, Orwellian power of the big tech companies, before it's too late. If it's not already too late.

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