You might have already read about it in the news elsewhere: The Twitter account of security researcher Mikko H. Hyppönen of F-Secure got suspended without warning two days ago. Mikko tried to contact Twitter support and tried everything in his power to understand why his Twitter account was suspended in first place. He received a short message by a Twitter representative after two days that mentioned why his account was suspended and that it was unsuspended.
Here is how Mikko describes what happended in his blog: He posted a warning about a new MySpace phishing website two month ago as a tweet using his Twitter account. This message contained an unclickable url of the phishing website to warn users and spread the word.
Twitter, after two months, figured that the url was a phishing url and made the decision to suspend the account. It is not clear if this was an automatic or manual suspension. The Twitter account of Mikko was restored after two days and the following explanations was given:
I’ve unsuspended your acct.
You were suspended for using the malware URL rnyspeceDOTcom in DMs.
Be careful!
We scan evrythng for malware.
To make matters worse all of his followers and people that he followed were not restored. Both counts showed 0.
The whole incident raises several questions:
Twitter's reaction fell short and put the blame on the Twitter user rather on an ineffective way of handling the incident. Until things change Twitter users should be very careful what they post in Twitter.
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Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.
Twitter is just abjg brother project to file all the personal data you put online.
Better choice is to get a free personal blog that delivers RSS feeds for those who are interested. This is a more uaer friendly choice. just my .02 $ here.
So, this is the thanks the guy gets for trying to help everyone else, and Twitter, and no apology from Twitter either for such a major cock up. Besides, they should NOT be interfering with his personal info anyway, as this is contradictory not to mention hypocrisy. Well, this has certainly made me think twice about joining Twitter.
well this just sucks. my account is suspended now. its good to see that they unsuspend quickly. i’ll either wait or open another account.