That’s what I see Twitter, an empty threat
Update The @OhMyVag account has been unsupended! It just took me opening a ticket and it was back in three days. Now I don’t know what to do with it 
The image below is a screencap of a recent support ticket I had opened with Twitter. A little back story is in order:
I run 25+ “retweet” bots on Twitter. One day three were suspended, then eight more, then those eight were reinstated that same day like someone made a mistake. The first three were still suspended.
I’ve dealt with this one time for @shutupmeg and was able to get the account reinstated but had to promise that I would not use the retweet function provided by their API. Manual retweets would have been ok but at the time I figured I’d leave retweeting for that account off for a while.
So over to open a support ticket I went. You’ll want to read that ticket and I’ll provide a bit more info. While these accounts were suspended I went over to check @delbius. From what I can gather she’s the head of Twitter’s anti-spam “and all that jazz” team. People usually contact her directly to have issues taken care of. I noticed that @redscarebot was also suspended at around the same time my bots were. Someone alerted it’s creator, the creator (if I remember correctly) and someone else mentioned it to @delbius and it was unsuspended. The only difference between my retweet bots and @redscarebot is that he adds a word or two mentioning communism along with the retweet.
As you could imagine I was pretty miffed as to why that account was allowed to stay up while mine were not. Looking back at the support ticket you can see that once I called their support out on this I had a very hard time getting a response from them. I asked again and again leaving days between updates with no reply.
I finally received an answer. They obviously know that I have a large-ish set of bots that all do the same thing and work the same way. Twitter wants to lower the “annoyance factor” of retweet bots and felt that via this support ticket was a good way to inform me of that. Now, I know they can be annoying and I’ve gone through great lengths to ensure that my bots aren’t as intrusive as others that I have seen. Take @poutine_bot for example that breaks my “Don’t RT an RT rule.” You can see more information on how I try to be less annoying than you’d think in my blog post Things to consider when you make a bot on Twitter
Anyway, as you can see below I have someone on Twitter’s support team telling me to convert every single bot that I have from doing a “manual retweet” (like “RT @username tweet”) to using the API retweet function. If you remember what I mentioned earlier about @shutupmeg’s suspension I specifically agreed not to use that function as it lead to that account’s suspension. You can view that support ticket here http://bit.ly/cXpJoo
What’s really amazing is that I was threatened if I don’t do this, all of those other accounts would be suspended as well. Now once you start talking about all of them, to me, it becomes something that needs to be formally stated. Not something to be thrown in to a support ticket. Coincidentally, I did not change one thing about the other bots and four months later NONE of them have been suspended as stated by “Ben” in the support ticket below. No one contacted me personally about this and no one ever told me the date that this change had to be made.
Moral of the story: It’s a crap shoot with Twitter’s support and rules that may apply to one person won’t apply elsewhere. You won’t get any explanation about what they are basing their decisions on even though to onlookers everything looks the same. Once you question them enough they’ll respond back with empty threats. That’s what I see from you Twitter, an empty threat.
(click on the image to see a larger version of it)
