I’ve been a Twitter user since 2008. My account was suspended a week ago without explanation. There has been no response to my appeals. My first swing through Google looking for information seemed to indicate that it might take a week to hear back from them. This thread is helpful as it seems to indicate that it is now taking as long as a month to resolve these problems.
Twitter is a small company, but there is absolutely no reason why their customer support should be this bad. For example, Heather says that her account was swept up by an anti-spam bot. There is no reason why a spam bot could not have automatically generated an email to her, indicating the reason that her account was suspended. This would not have restored her account any faster, but it would, at least, have given her some useful information about the reason for the problem she was having to deal with. In addition, all of Twitter’s support pages about account suspension indicate that when your account is suspended you should receive an email from them with an explanation. That wasn’t the case for me and apparently it was not the case for Heather.
Furthermore, Twitter has a staff, and they have a support queue. It should be possible for their support queue to automatically determine approximately how long it will take them to respond to an appeal. Googling around, it seems that some appeals get handled in a couple of days, and some take as long as a month. Knowing when I should expect to hear back from them would greatly reduce the frustration associated with this situation. This is basic customer service stuff that anyone with a call center has implemented these days.
Finally, Twitter account suspensions do more then prevent you from posting content or following new people. They also prevent you from reading your feed. There is no good reason for this other than lazy programming. The things in your feed are things that are published by the people you follow. There should be no harm in allowing you to continue to read your feed during the month or more that it will take their support team to get around to handling your case. It should be possible to implement that even if they want to remove your account name from people’s follower lists.
I think that Twitter’s heavy handed approach here is a significant competitive vulnerability that will eventually cost them their place in the social media landscape if they don’t address it.
