I Was Banned From Twitter.

Update: My account has been restored, thanks for your support :)

If you follow my blog posts you might know about my project Digital Rights , it’s my attempt to become part of a wide discussion about social change and the future of technology.

Unlike other public figures, I don’t frame the technology story in terms of black and white, some privacy advocates speak of Google or Facebook as the clear enemy, they may raise interesting points about Internet addiction and monopoly like behavior but they forget about the wider ethical, social and economical picture.

With Digital Rights my goal is to simply re-frame a typical privacy issue into an ethical issue, to hopefully remind ourselves that social media was a creation of people and human problems require human solutions.

So to promote my project I had to break my own rules and use twitter, I gave myself a pass because it’s not my personal account, I wouldn’t post what’s on my mind unlike on this very blog, it would be only about the project.

So I created an account with a protonmail email to go with it and just as I logged in it suspended my account.

It asked for SMS verification and I went with it, provided my info and basically sacrificing all my privacy for promoting a more privacy minded world, I thought I was for the better good so I continued despite my moral inclination.

The SMS didn’t arrive, I complained with an old account, send countless emails, restarted my phone very so often for the entire day until it send me the SMS verification code.

After that minor inconvenience I supposed it would be it but today I was commenting on a techcrunch post, the tweet linked an article titled “Why no one really quits Google or Facebook”.

I begun to write my response, I said that an overlooked part of why is nobody leaving Google or Facebook it’s because they are a kind of social contract mixed with low digital literacy rates, you give me a service and I give you my data seems like a fair deal if you don’t know how to be social on the Internet without Facebook or Twitter.

And as soon as I clicked reply on my last tweet I got this screen:

Once again I’m not getting the SMS verification code, so I’m stuck. To follow up my issue I opened a ticket with their support system and here’s how I described my problem:

Hello, my account was suspended without warning, this happened while I was tweeting at techcrucnh about why people don’t quit services like google or facebook (yeah even twitter) despite the massive privacy issues. Banning me for being critical of the platform seems far fetched, I suspect my account was flagged as a spam account is because of my usage, I created this account to promote privacy in the digital age and as you can imagine I am a very privacy minded person: I use protonmail as my email provider and I use twitter via a mobile android app that blocks cookies and other kinds of trackers. I theorize this is why my account looks suspicions to an algorithm, it runs on a not so common client, it has intermittent activity and it uses a very unpopular email provider, this characteristics describe me perfectly, but for an algorithm it rings the alarms. The strange twitter setup extends to he rest of the tech in my life, now more relevant to my account suspension: My phone is configured in a very unusual way to avoid tracking of many types. When I created this account I was also flagged as a bot & had to ‘prove that I’m a human’ and needed SMS verification, I had problems with SMS verification then and I still have problems. I did not receive the latest SMS verification code, I only have one from November 2018. I can’t tell if the problem is on twitters end or my phone setup and therefore I appear to be locked out for good. Hopefully a human is reading this so we can work out this issue, can you prove you’re human? - OK but jokes aside - Please get back to me via my email. -Thanks, Alex.

I give Twitter the benefit of the doubt, its probably an algorithm picking me up by accident rather than Twitter engaging in censorship, again I think to have a healthy discussion we don’t need privacy advocates calling company ‘X’ the next skynet.

It’s really ironic how it is us humans that need to prove ourselves on the platforms we built, hopefully this account suspension is just another minor hurtle in my journey for tech better fit for people.

I acknowledge the world ‘Ban’ in the title is misleading, but I just want to call more attention to my project and it’s ideas.

Update: My account has been restored, thanks for your support :)

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