RSSI’d like you to imagine something for me.
Its a Thursday night and you’re up talking to your friends. You’ve had a great night and say goodnight to them, looking forward to chatting again in the morning.
The next morning, your world is thrown into turmoil. You wake up only to find that your contact with the outside world has been blocked. You’re not allowed to talk to any of your friends, and they can’t contact you. You have no idea why this has happened, and no-one will explain it. All you are told is that you might find out what has happened sometime in the next 30 days. You are cutoff from the outside world.
After three days of nothing you finally are told that you have been cutoff because you have made too many friends in too short a time, which is not allowed. You find out that you will be able to talk to your friends again, but only in a weeks time. You have no way to challenge this, and no-one who can assist. You are helpless.
The above story happened in the last week to someone I know. Jono Haysom, a colleague of mine at Telstra and an avid user of Twitter (@jonoh is his Twitter id) went to bed on Thursday night last week after chatting with his friends on Twitter, and woke up on Friday morning to find that his account was suspended. He had no idea why and when he contacted Twitter they responded with an auto-response email saying they would get back to him in 30 days. After much agitation, they eventually came back to him on Sunday and said he could re-apply to open up his account in 7 days time.
The reason they gave for suspending his account was that he had followed back too many people that had followed him in too short a time . That’s right, he followed people that were already following him! Apparently mass followings like this are a trait of spammers so he was blocked.
Besides this being grossly unfair, the bigger issue here is that as services like Twitter become more and more prevalent, and more and more of our communications with friends moves online, being cutoff from your social network for a lengthy period of time such as a week would be an extremely unsettling, frustrating and stressful situation for anyone, never mind a person who has done nothing wrong. If you extend that to a business environment, exclusion like this could affect a persons livelihood in a huge way, especially if the period was not say a week but a month or longer.
The fact is, the above could happen to anyone at any time, and nothing can be done about it. The administrators of services like Twitter have total control over who can and can’t use their service, and can kick someone off the service at anytime. There is no-one overseeing what they are doing, and no way to appeal against any of their decisions.
Ok, Jono was still able to use email and other services to talk to some of his friends with whom he had established relationships outside of Twitter, but one can easily imagine a time where all communication services are controlled by one group or organisation (look at Google Wave for an example of an integrated service which combines multiple communication mechanisms).
Imagine the power a group like that would wield then. Perhaps we should start thinking about that future and considering what checks and balances need to be put in place so that there is always a way to address an injustice such as what was inflicted on Jono.
Its scary when you think about it.
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Update: Well its been a week since @jonoh was suspended and he still hasnt heard anything more back from them. He has sent 7 emails, many with the same response
“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. We will do our best to get back to you within 30 days.”
This really is an indictment on Twitter and its error management processes . They had a loyal and high-volume user who I only ever saw promote the service, and they have totally disenfranchised him by cutting him off from the outside world.
Lets hope this doesnt start happening to more and more of us across social networking services as they try to crack down on the growing spam problem affecting their legitimate users.
Shugg's World 
June 16, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I really cant see one group taking all the power. Google wave is an open protocol like email so nobody will be able to “control” that.
And the idea that one day we will all be under the one umbrella is spurious at best.
I for one am glad that twitter is doing what it can against spam, something an open protocol would find a lot harder to do.
The only downside is sometimes people will be inconvenienced for a while for setting up autobots on their accounts. As K-Rudd would say.. “fair suck of the sauce bottle”
June 17, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Willemrt,
The utility of a service like Twitter increases for an individual user the more they are able to communicate with their friends and people they are interested in on that service. Therefore, they generally encourage people they know to use the same service they are.
This encourages whole clusters of users to gravitate towards a single service rather than fragement to multiple services. Thus, I can easily see that its quite possible that a single service (if not Twitter then something else) could quite feasibly become the pseudo “phonebook for the internet” (to paraphrase Jason Calacanis as I’ve heard him state a few times on the TwiT podcast).
If this does happen then we better have safeguards in place to make sure whoever is controlling the central database acts fairly towards all its users. I agree totally that protecting against spam is a very good thing, it just needs to come with some checks and balances so that it doesnt impact legitimate users in the way that Jono has been impacted.
June 18, 2009 at 9:46 am
But we must remember that twitter is a free service and they cant really afford (despite the hyped valuations and funding) to put on a whole bunch of people to monitor things like @jonoh to make sure that they arent in fact spam.
I also question the wisdom of just following everyone back who follows you. That doesn’t seem like you are necessarily building a good community, just a large one. In many ways it was his own fault.
And a week off twitter is not exactly the end of the world 🙂
June 19, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Hi,
A mate of mine has had a similar but different issue with Twitter in the last few weeks. They removed his business from Twitter search without any warning or reasoning. His account was not suspended and initial communication indicated he had not breached the TOS but no answer as to why he was removed from Twitter Search & Google.
I have to agree with Shane on this. The old saying who’s watching the watchers. Me suspects Twitter could be being evil, but then again I could just be cynical.
July 6, 2009 at 11:27 am
You gets what you pays for. 😐
Do you remember when Twitter cut off all of Australia from their SMS service? They are completely in their rights to do this. I can’t see how we can argue for some kind of Twitter oversight group (“checks and balances”).
Twitter is hardly unique in this sense. Similar complaints have been leveled at Paypal and Apple, for example.