Something fishy going on with Twitter?

This Monday, Twitter suspended several accounts belonging to a prominent Texas conservative organization, Empower Texans, its staff, and another conservative organization, AgendaWise, created by a former employee. The best part? They received no notice or explanation of the suspension. Here’s part of Empower Texans’ official response:

The Empower Texans team has never knowingly violated Twitter Rules, and have yet to receive any official notice or clarification of the action. Furthermore, a simple examination of our accounts clearly shows the Empower Texans team have not run afoul of Twitter’s guidelines. …Individual Twitter accounts are suspended everyday for a litany of reasons only to be reinstated after a quick review. The fact that an organizational feed, along with the personal accounts of all those associated with the organization, were suspended at the same time is odd and raises concern. Even more so that they were suspended with no notice or warning.

I don’t like to jump to conclusions, but it’s definitely fishy that all six accounts related to Empower Texans were shut down on the same day. Empower Texans’ President Michael Sullivan (formerly @mqsullivan) says he suspects it’s just a glitch. Could be a group of liberal opponents decided to flood the account with spam reports. Either way, Twitter needs to respond. Three days have passed – eternity in the world of social media – and Twitter has yet to justify or explain the suspension.

Update 10:45 am: An account called @FreeMQS claiming to be Michael Sullivan has been created, which Sullivan himself confirmed is fake in a comment on this post.

Update 1:30 pm: Looks like the suspension is over. From Empower Texans’ website:

On Wednesday afternoon, Empower Texans / Texans for Fiscal Responsibility president Michael Quinn Sullivan received a vaguely worded auto-response-style message suggesting the suspension was due to unspecified violations of Twitter policies. However, we aren’t aware of any regular Twitter activities (tweeting, re-tweeting, etc) that we engaged in that in any way violate Twitter rules.

Tags: Twitter

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