Feels pretty bad huh, to get your account suspended? We’re going to help you get to the bottom of it and show you how to appeal the suspension.
In order to get your account unsuspended your have to first find out why you got suspended in the first place
There are a number of reasons you could’ve been suspended by Twitter. Remember it’s their platform and they make the rules (for a reason). You might not agree with them all but you do have to abide by them.
Lets sum up the reasons why you can be suspended and we’ll go through them one by one:
- Aggressive engagement
- Spamming
- Automation
- Safety reasons
- Privacy reasons
- Authenticity
There are a few more but they’re not very common to be a reason for account suspension. Let’s just say you wouldn’t be looking for reasons why your account was suspended because you know why 🙂
Aggressive engagement
Twitter is built on engagement. Likes, retweets, following. But if you overdo it, Twitter will think you are manipulating the system. We don’t know the exact thresholds but if you follow more than 50 people in a single hour you have quite a high chance of getting your account suspended.
Same with liking and retweeting a lot. It’s a bit different with commenting. If you keep adding value, don’t repeat the same (bland) phrases over and over, chances are you won’t get suspended fast.
You have to be most concerned when you use automation tools to follow and unfollow people to gain followers yourself.
That goes for automating comments, likes and RT’s too. If you use a bot / a tool to this for you without you giving consent to that action you’re very likely to get flagged.
Spamming
Spam can be a variety of things if you ask Twitter. They’re also pretty vague in their rules because they want to have maximum ability to be able to maintain order on their platform.
Sending people unsolicited DM’s (Direct Messages) with links to (sketchy) websites are considered spam.
Posting the same content over and over is considered spam too. That happens for example when you keep posting the same links to your website with the same text in the tweet that describes the website.
If also happens is you keep tweeting the same message over and over again. Or keep retweeting the same message.
The spam flag is also raised when you add people (manually or automated) to Lists or moments.
Another reason why the spam flag is often raised is because people create multiple accounts and retweet those accounts constantly. It’s OK to have multiple accounts. But you shouldn’t be engaging with that account with the sole purpose of getting it more engagement. Retweeting your second account sometimes is fine. Doing multiple times a day is not.
A lot of people have gotten their accounts suspended for that behavior.
Automation
Automating is oftentimes used in a way that’s totally fine. As long as you as the user perform an action to automate that particular thing. That means you can schedule and automate your tweeting if someone writes your tweets by hand and imports them into a scheduling tool (like Hypefury).
You can also have your tweet automatically retweeted when you are the one that’s making that decision.
You can’t however have a software tool that spins content, creates new tweets from old tweets and keeps tweeting that stuff over and over. Same with selecting someone’s following and have it followed automatically by a tool.
Safety reasons
An online platform like Twitter thrives when people feel safe to share. When people are being discriminated, harassed abused, etc. etc. Twitter’s safe environment disappears.
Remember the saying: hate the game, not the player. If you keep that in mind with all your interactions on Twitter you’ll be safe.
There’s a big difference in saying “I hate the fact that … “. That’s mostly freedom of speech. But once you say “I hate YOU …” it becomes personal. You’re attacking the player and not the game anymore.
Your tweet (or DM) will get reported and you’ll lose your account. Just like that. There’s only a slight chance you can get it back after you appealed.
Privacy reasons
How would you feel if someone on Twitter would leave your home address on there? Or your phone number? For everyone to see? You wouldn’t be amused. Twitter is a very open place and you can say a lot on Twitter but don’t invade people’s privacy please.
It’s also not allowed to threaten to expose this information.
This also goes for photo’s you’d rather not have shared online. Think explicit stuff that was made in an intimate setting.
Authenticity
If you steel someone else’s personality you’ll get caught and suspended. You can’t impersonate anyone. You can’t steel anyones “face” and use it as their own without consent. You also can’t share fake news.
After the 2016 elections Twitter has been aggressively going after (Russian) bots that were spamming the platform with fake news about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. They still have a huge problem when looking at (bot) accounts that share a lot of fake information though.
Found out why you got suspended?
After reading about the reasons Twitter suspends accounts, did you find out why yours was suspended?
If so, go here and appeal the decision. Before you actually go there, make sure you get your story straight.
Everyone makes mistakes. But if you do (and especially if you knew about it before you made them) own up to them.
This form gets checked by an actually human being. Do you think they can’t smell horse shit from a mile away? These people get to check these forms all day long all year round. Be honest. Show sympathy and own up your mistakes.
If you didn’t (and still don’t) know what you did wrong, be honest about that too. They have automated systems and sometimes they pick out the wrong people to suspend. They will unsuspended your account.
