Social Media Lockdown

roller coaster
The offending illustration.

I find myself in a new situation: Twitter has locked me out of my account.

I have an account there (@AborigenGTS) that I use to promote my giantess/shrink-fetish writing. It goes with my email, this blog, my Buffer account, all my social media channels. Yesterday I posted an old Buttman picture, that of a giantess with a roller coaster leading into her butt, to promote #ButtyJuly17, the size-fetish writing contest that will be themed around butts.

I wasn’t given a warning about the picture. I was locked out of my account, told that it was exhibiting automatic behavior against Twitter’s rules. This is unreasonable and indefensible. But I thought I’d play their game and request a validation code to prove my identity. They never sent one. I requested more validation codes, and Twitter continued to ignore these requests, ultimately informing me I’d maxed out my number of requests and to try again later. So I lodged complaints to them through two different channels. A day later, I still haven’t heard anything from them.

Today I created a temporary account, new handle, new email address, meant to be trashed after my main account got restored. I added three people I knew, uploaded an avatar and background image (neither of which were obscene), and before I could post anything Twitter suspended that account too.

Screengrab of Twitter's suspended account warning.

What could this behavior have been? I hadn’t done anything. I can only guess that Twitter identified me by IP, similar handle, the contacts I’d added, and maybe even the size of my browser window. I could test this by creating an unrelated account and introduce one factor after another until Twitter banishes me again.

So that’s going to be frustrating. Most, if not all, of my socialization for the Aborigen network happens over Twitter. Most of my readership comes from Tumblr, strangely, but no one talks to me there. Facebook is just a redirect to my website, so is Instagram. Google Plus is beyond useless. Being locked out of Twitter (a free service, yes, so they can abuse their users as much as they like) is going to adversely affect my readership, and I’m not sure how to work around that. I can push more energy into DeviantArt, and I guess I could start working within Giantess City, but Twitter was my primary outreach. I have no idea why I’m being stonewalled and blackballed.

twitter-support

UPDATE: Well, it’s fixed. I got an email from Twitter Support announcing my account was unsuspended, and they apologized for the hassle. The confusion came from more bots: their anti-spam bots thought I was a bot and locked me down. I’m not sure what I was doing that make them think so, lots of people use Buffer and regulated schedules to post crap, don’t they? Is that what Buffer and Hootsuite are for? Anyway, I started an account to promote ButtyJuly17, and that didn’t get suspended, and the next day my regular account was up and online.

twitter-apology

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

9 thoughts on “Social Media Lockdown

    1. Yes, it’s really irritating because there are no viable alternatives. I can’t run over to the parallel-Twitter and rejoin my readership there. Everyone’s agreed to one channel with no alternates and if you get locked out, that’s the end of it.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. There’s no tech support that can help me break back into Twitter. I created a false account and they suspended that one, too, before I’d even done anything. If I create a third account, I’ll have to do so in a proxy browser like Tor or Epic, change the browser window size, and be careful which accounts I add. I’ve been registering complaints with Twitter Support for half a day, but they are under no rush to address user needs.

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  1. Sympathies and shared vexations. Just over a year ago, the same thing happened to my Tumblr account. No warning, no immediate response to inquiries. A week later I was finally informed that “one or more” of my posts had provided a link to a site that Tumblr had deemed dangerous or otherwise suspect. They never did tell me which post it was, so even after they restored my account, I couldn’t delete the offending post (they might have done so themselves, but there was never any follow-up). I imagine the offending link was an effort to properly credit the source of some commercial size porn hosted on a sketchy site, but I never had any confirmation of this. As a consequence, I’ve stuck to just putting studio names in plain text and letting people Google it if they want to find it.

    The whole experience left me jumpy. All the posts I had queued up for that week were lost. As you note, free services don’t really owe customer support to users. One can’t shake the impression that it was almost random, as there are plenty of other blogs doing the same thing without a problem. I fear this sort of thing will become more common now that the sale of Yahoo (who owns Tumblr) to Verizon has gone through. I made a sub-page listing all the other size-fanatasy-related sites I frequent in case any of my Tumblr followers want to find me, sort of a last will and testament.

    The worst thing was, after my account was restored, it was obvious that nobody even noticed I had been gone.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. So, it can happen to any of us. It’s good to see you back, though we can always stay in touch even if Twitter goes up in flames. That’s a comfort.

    Also, how curious that most of your reading traffic comes from Tumblr. Only a small fraction of it comes from there, while most of my longtime readers found me and keep visiting me through Google. But my blog is old, nearly as old as Twitter, which provides about a third of my visitors.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I keep saying I wish I knew how to talk to Tumblr, but it’s like a Stanislaw Lem alien. All I can do is transmit, and something in my transmission means something to them, and they come.

      Liked by 1 person

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