arrrrrrgh! Twitter suspended our twitter account.

Not sure what happened. I started off by following all the followers of leninology.blogspot.com, known as “Lenin’s Tomb,” and everything was fine. And then I started following the 500 followers of thismodernworld.com–that’s Tom Tomorrow’s blog. I was also following some random right-wing twitterers just to see what they were up to. I don’t understand why I was blocked. I sent an email asking what I did wrong. There were about a hundred followers at leninology, the twitter account of a UK-based, very liberal blogger. I found some interesting people, and had some good exchanges that way. That experiment went well, so I decided to try it on a larger blog that I liked. Tom Tomorrow’s blog was the first blog I ever got addicted to. During the first GW term I was feeling a lot of despair and his blog, and then subsequently atrios and dailykos became daily shelters for a liberal refugee. I thought that his big fans would be following his twitter account, and they would be the kind of people I would like to connect with. (Connect with, make a digital community, etc.)

I’m not sure if there is a conspiracy against sarcastic twittering about Ayn Rand or not. Maybe I should just start another account.

But I wonder. Are the founders and stewards of twitter rabid Ayn Randians? They let all sorts of leftwingers twitter away. Of course, it was the Republicans, after the Obama victory, who were talking about how they need to get on twitter. What is the relationship between twittering and collectivism?* Maybe there is something attractive to “individualists” about twitter.  Something about crystal blue-eyed visionaries  banding together, shooting off their twitchy, curt nuggets of visionary-genius, ADHD style. It’s all about WHO you follow. You can’t just follow anyone you want, apparently. Why should it be anyone’s business whom I follow?

The tone of the letter I received was somewhat chilling, in the dystopian fashion of Brazil; a sanitary and socialist, or a corporatized missive:

Hi there, Helmut Doring!

This is an automated response to share reasons why Twitter suspends accounts for investigation; we’re currently reviewing your request. If you’ve already sent in the information requested at bottom, there is no need to send it again.

Twitter suspends accounts for Terms of Service violations or spam investigation. (Please visit your own profile page to make sure you’re actually suspended and not viewing someone else’s suspended profile page.) If you are suspended, it’s most likely for one or more of these reasons::

User Abuse
* a large number of people block the profile or write in with spam complaints
* aggressive following
* imbalanced ratio: the number of followers is small compared to number of people following
* misuse of the reply feature
* updates consist of duplicate links and/or text
* updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
* updates consist of updates poached from others’ timelines, passed off as one’s own

Technical Abuse
* updates consist of links pointing to phishing sites, malware, or other harmful material
* a large number of accounts is created in a short amount of time
* an account is identified as belonging to a spam cluster

When this happens, we suspend the account for investigation and hide the contents from the public view in order to remove the cause of complaint.

It’s important to us that the Twitter community receives only the content they’d like to receive. While we do welcome feed-based accounts, we discourage aggressive following and other tactics that will alarm people.

If you feel you’ve been suspended in error, please reply to this email with a short explanation if you haven’t already, and don’t forget to include your user name.

Thanks,

Twitter Support

This is kind of like when the insurance company refuses you for whatever reason. The individualists who oppose a welfare state might say that well, if I don’t like twitter’s service, I can just CHOOSE something else. But I can’t CHOOSE something else. My only CHOICE is Rearden Metal. And since the visionairies have determined that Rearden Metal is perfect, I have no fallback except the old technology. Boring old blog technology. But I guess I should just be happy that the visionairies made twitter technology, and that the government doesn’t nationalize the technology so that poor people can get ahold of it.

Well, it’s all very confusing for this dumb secular humanist collectivist; but it does seem that my problem is that I was following too many people. I was being a leech. I have to build my following. I have to build my twitter account on the merit of my twittering. I got greedy. Or I wasn’t greedy enough. Arrrrrrgh!

* Note that I think that the collectivist/individualist dichotomy is, if not merely outmoded, possibly a false one. The new social media might be showing us in new ways how silly these ideas are.