It is now 00:36am and still no response from Delbius to this very important question.

In the meanwhile I am still getting DMs from people that I have followed in the past that have automatic replies setup.

Delbius answered to me about this:

When you were suspended, you’d disappeared; when restored, their service thinks you’re following for the first time.

I really love it when computer systems “think”.

And I am still getting DMs from people i started to follow in February.

And Delbius is probably sleeping.

But I was wrong.(Something that came as a surprised since everyone knows that I am never wrong)

I had sent a Twitter to Delbius with a link to my previous post as a peace offer. She read it. And she tweeted me back:

I’ve supplied the text that got you suspended in the ticket. Thanks.

I would note that the variant was trend hashtag spamming, not the spamming of a hashtag. There’s a difference.

My heart started to race! Really! I was finally going to  know what I had done that got me a suspended account, a serious warning and a very very very (really!) unpleasant sensation.

I loggged in at Twitter’s ZenDesk and here is what I found:

You sent out an update that contained the text:
“Check out new works and new tracks @ Please share and participate! #iranelection #humanrights)”
Obviously, the new works and new tracks were not, in fact, relevant to #iranelection and #humanrights which resulted in you being suspended.
While I was amused by your write-up, I would point out that having been suspended for a valid reason and then being unsuspended, patience regarding a follow up, particularly in light of us reserving a month for investigation is generally appreciated.

The first thing I noticed? There was no link to the tweet in question.

I read everything again.

And again. And again.

Then I realised why I was reading it over and over again: I wanted Twitter to be right. I wanted that all that I had felt and gone trough to be really my fault. I wanted to read on those lines that I had made an enormous mistake.

And so I read it again.

Some strange sensation on my brain was making me listen to a voice that kept repeating: “They were wrong! They were wrong!”

I tried to hush the voice away by reading it once again. And then it slapped me, the voice in my brain.

TWITTER WAS WRONG in suspending my account! George W. Bush wrong, Kim Il Jong wrong, Gordon Brown wrong!!!! Bananarama Milli Vanilli Modern Talking Samantha Fox WRONG! (If you don’t recognise any of these names probably you should be in bed by now and not reading this blog… Move along nothing to read here)

I shouted “They must be kidding me!!” but it was not really me, it was that voice that had taken over me.

Deep inside I still wanted Twitter to be right (This is how much I love Twitter)

I took a deep breath and returned to the Zendesk (For some reason they have called it Zendesk):

Del,
Please don’t think that I don’t appreciate the readiness with which you brought my account back to life. But I have to contest the suspension.
Here are my reasons:
The “new works and tracks” referred on that tweet pertain to the Artists for Freedom/Music for Freedom project that is a partner of United4Iran.
I am one of the founders of that project. This is a non-profit organization that recently got the contribution of Dj Spooky. Everyone working on the project is not being pay and is doing the project on their own free time.
All works are released under a Creative Commons License so people can share them and use them. (specially on the upcoming Global Day of Action July 25th).
The “Participate” “share bits refer to the call for action we are making, with the support of Soundcloud, Indaba and Creative Commons that wants to have people around the world record the word  Freedom in their own language and send it to us: the objective is to have a one hour long recording available for free download to be played at rallies that have Human Rights, Freedom of Speech and, at this time, the situation in Iran in mind.
I will leave you all the relevant URLs so you can verify the veracity of what I am telling you.
Arists for Freedom: http://artists4freedom.net
Music for Freedom: http://music.artists4freedom.net
Design for Freedom: http://design.artists4freedom.net

I read what I had written over and over again. I just wanted to make it clear. Waterford Crystal clear.

And then I hit send.

And  told Delbius that I had sent a reply via Twitter.

At this moment I really wanted an apology from Twitter via Delbius. I think that I had deserved an apology since I had been wrongly suspended, my night and morning had been a nightmare and lots of things were not done because my account had been suspended due to a mistake: human or machine caused, I don’t know.

But it was a mistake.

I am more than aware that lots of spam bots have started to use the trending hashtags and that had to be stopped. I understand that. But when a legitimate tweet is included then something is wrong with that system.

I only had to wait for 3 minutes to get the notice on my mailbox that I had got a reply from Delbius.

As your account is not currently suspended, there’s not much to contest. We’ll take a look at the links at some point in the future, but no other accounts are currently suspended due to sending out that update.

I didn’t have to read this again to react! Imagine Bill Compton meets Eric meets Godrick meets Sylar all focused on a huge “What?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?”

At this point in time, the lights of all windows in all of  the  buildings  around me lit up. Not really. But it would’ve been nice.

I could not believe this. Really I couldn’t. There was not much to contest? There was a lot to contest! Specially because my account was now a stained account. Remember that “if this behavior occurs again, the account will be permanently suspended.” ????

I do! I will probably have nightmares for the rest of my life about it.

I had to reply. I really had to reply. I had to take another deep breath. Make that two and a lucky strike.

Ice tea and another lucky strike.

Deep breath.

Another lucky strike just for luck.

Deep breath.

Back to the Zendesk:

The only reason why I am worried about this is the fact that you stated that if I do something like this again my account “will be permanently suspended”.
I am guessing that some kind of flag exists on my account regarding this kind of behaviour that, as i explained above, I consider to be an error.

Being 2 days away from the Global Action Day on July 25th it is more than sure that I will use those hashtags again regarding updates on the several projects we are running regarding the event.
Please advise me on the best way to make this without running into an impromptu account suspension.

I am sorry to waste your time with this but, at this end of the line, it is something really important.

Again i checked and re-checked. Waterford Crystal for some reason came to mind. And water lots of water.

…

…

It is now 48h more or less since my account got suspended.

I am still getting DMs from months ago.

I still didn’t get any advice or information how I should go on Tweeting and using the hashtags.

Truth be told, my account didn’t  get suspended so far.

But to live with that fear is like having  this sensation that at any time, any place a huge fail whale is going to fall down from the sky and smash me out of Twitter forever.

When I went to login into Twitter (See how busy I was that I was not even logged in?) Destroy Twitter wouldn’t accept my credentials.

Went to the web interface, got logged in and ….. BOOOM!!!

My account had been suspended. It is impossible to describe the next minutes. Logged out, logged in again. I could not understand it. But the fact was that my account had been suspended.

Google searches, with the help of Cat,  brought no hope: Accounts could be suspended for several reasons during 30 days. Other searches reported random accounts being suspended due to a database error. In my mind the thought “Up to 30 days without Tweeting?! This is going to be a major technology cold turkey!!!!!“

I was so nervous that if it wasn’t for Cat I would never had found the link at the so-called “zendesk” of Twitter. I reported my problem, got a ticket number, then one  e-mail from Twitter teaching me how to activate my mobile phone.

Some minutes later another mail from Twitter, a copy of my report and telling me that someone at Twitter was responsible for my ticket. A twitter search and there she was: Delbius.

There is something really cruel and double sided about being “accused” of something you are almost sure you didn’t do:

This was how I felt:

While most of the people  I interact with on Twitter  keep complaining about being massively followed by make-more-money-nude-girls-get-more-followers-i-want-you-in-my-bed-your-ticket-to-a-dream-job spam  bots, my account had been suspended. Of course that Delbius became the focus of all my “rage”.

Of course this was not the Delbiu’s fault, the person. But, believe me, when you are so much into Twitter for personal and professional reasons, like I am,  to have your account suspended just turns anyone into an irrational sentient being.

So back to the Twitter Zen Desk Interaction:

Twitter said:

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

And I replied:

Hello Twitter Support,

Regarding my account @fjfonseca :

If you check my timeline you will see content and interaction with other Twitter users in a balanced manner.

I have not been reported as spam ever, I have a number of followers that is bigger than the number of people I am following and I try to keep my followers list clean of spam bots.

My links do not point to any malware or phishing sites. Actually you can see by the number of mentions I get that my content is RT lots of time.

For all of these reasons I do believe that my account has been suspended in error.

Tick tack, tick tack, tick tack, tick tack…

Nothing, nanoseconds after nanoseconds no e-mail reply. Miliseconds went by and nothing.

I was checking my mail every 2 seconds. In the meanwhile Cat was looking for my Tweets that were gone forever.

Yes, when you get your account suspended you cease to exist. The only evidence that you were ever there are the mentions that other users write. Blade Runner came to mind “All those tweets will be lost, like tears in the rain“.

Still no mail. At Delbius profile on Twitter a hint that she was sleeping. Sleeping!!!!!! Sleeping!!!! Sleeping while my account was suspended, gone forever. (Yes melodrama was kicking in at this time).

So there I was, pissed off, angry at Tiwtter, at Delbius at…

Mail Message.

Paul aka Dj Spooky, yes THAT Dj Spooky, had just reached the general mailbox of Artists for Freedom wanting to know about the possibility of giving us one unreleased track for the “Music for Freedom” project.

REWIND!!! What? Yes, Dj Spooky writing us to offer an unreleased track. And me with my Twitter account suspended. Not that I needed it for anything but I wanted it ACTIVE!!!

I wanted to Tweet this! I wanted to Tweet about lots of things! And my account was suspended. And Delbius was sleeping. Once again my thoughts on how useful it would be to be a vampire, sometimes, crossed my mind. (You can now sing the True Blood main theme)

Fast Forward. Some hours later. After setting up the Dj Spooky track at Music for Freedom and writing to my guys at PublicSpaces about the Twitter Gate, went to sleep for 2 hours. I could not really sleep. I know I have slept but it felt like I didn’t. It was strange.

Twitter should think about making a withdrawal drug available worldwide for suspended account users. It would be a success. Maybe this is the way to monetize Twitter. Who knows?

My account was still suspended. 8am in the morning and my account was still suspended and Delbius was still sleeping. I decided to ignore it. Had lots on my mailbox to take care of.

Meanwhile in Barcelona…

In Barcelona, Jordi was starting his day at the office and decided on his own that there was a limit to everything, being everything the fact that my account was suspended. And so he decided to ask everyone at the PublicSpaces Lab time line to start ReTweeting a message to Delbius asking her to put my account back online. It was like a wave but Delbius still wouldn’t answer.

I started to get e-mails from people asking me what had happened, giving me advice (open a new account and we will help you get your followers back), asking if there was something they could do.

But there was nothing anyone could do unless they knew where Delbius lived and woke her up.

After a one hour and a half phone interview for the “WhosWho” Directory I still had no Twitter account. Yes, it will be one of the topics of my interview when they publish their new issue of the quarterly magazine:

- “What brings you stress in your day to day?”

- “Getting my Twitter account suspended” (and 15m describing the whole process)

At 3:40pm the first sign from Delbius:

@PublicSpacesLab Please don’t ever ask for a RT on a suspended account. I’ll look when I can.

Oh! Oh! Delbius was mad!!! And rightly so.

@PublicSpacesLab Perhaps you are unaware, but all you have done is clog my replies tab and inconvenience other users trying to get help.

Delbius also sent other messages similar to these to Fernando Mateus, that made the mistake of not including “RT @PublicSpaceslab” on his tweets. (I am sure we will correct this next time).

Funny or not, depends on what side you are, while Delbius was tweeting  the PublicSpacesLab account other people kept ReTweeting the original message.

Some seconds later my account was back. Back but with a warning:

Your account was correctly suspended for hashtag spam — spamming a trend with an unrelated update. I’ve restored the account; however, if this behavior occurs again, the account will be permanently suspended.

Additionally, please ensure that your company never again requests retweets regarding a suspended account. One request is sufficient. Doing so in the future can lead to the username being filtered.

Hashtag Spam?! Excuse me??? Hashtag Spam? Me that uses hashtags like “#whateverhappenedtoprettyhashtags” and “#ibetthatyouwillhavetoreadthismorethanoncetounderstandwhatitsays”?

Me? A proud member of the #hashtagmafia and the European Capo for the #hashtagmafia #family?

(What is this #hashtagmafia thing, you ask? It is a group of people at Twitter that take pride in coming up with original hashtags.)

To be accusing me of using a trend hashtag to get my content noticed is likely to accuse Al Capone of being a CIA agent.

So I went back to my ticket and wrote:

Hello Del,
First of all I thank you for the swift resolution of this situation.
Secondly I apologise for the calls to action from my team and others but this suspension was a surprise to everyone.

Could you please tell me what hashtag was used with unrelated content? I am not aware of doing it on purpose. Maybe you can point me to the Tweet in question.

It would help me know what it was and not to commit the same mistake again.

It is now 00:36am and still no response from Delbius to this very important question.

In the meanwhile I am still getting DMs from people that I have followed in the past that have automatic replies setup.

Delbius answered to me about this:

When you were suspended, you’d disappeared; when restored, their service thinks you’re following for the first time.

I really love it when computer systems “think”.

And I am still getting DMs from people i started to follow in February.

And  Delbius is probably sleeping.

(Click here for the second episode)