The Upgrade
Twitter’s Suspension Bots Are Out of Control
An innocent account gets caught up in a bot purge, with no explanation why
WinObs was gone. Snapped away like a Thanos victim with no forwarding address. My long-time Twitter pal Rich Hay’s Twitter account was gray, though not quite dust.
Hay and I met nearly a decade ago at an early NASA Tweetup to celebrate and witness one of the last Space Shuttle launches. We bonded over our love of space and, later, a somewhat shared Windows expertise. Hay’s operating system insights are levels above mine—he’s a member of the Windows Insider program, Microsoft’s open-software testing program—but as someone who covers the platform, I appreciated the knowledge he brought to the topic on his website Windows Observer and the associated Twitter account WinObs.
Hay’s name had come up in association with a project I was working on, so I decided to contact him on Twitter. And that’s when I discovered that WinObs—an 11-year-old account with 22,000 followers, 500,000+ tweets, and nothing but good, clean, techy content—had been suspended.
Twitter has spent a lot of time developing extensive platform rules, spelling them out in exhaustive detail on this page. Violating any of these rules can put you on the path to account…
