John Ward Appeal for Slog fans to support me against Twitter

TWITTERSHIP: After forcing me to go back to zero through their own incompetence….

TWITTER BANS THE SLOG

WordPress mysteriously trashes this post, updated 10.9.13

Open warfare broke out between The Slog and Twitter yesterday afternoon, following Sunday’s Slogpost on the subject of poor Twitter service. This is about as blatant as censorship of commercial criticism – entirely justified – gets. And in a spookily ‘coincidental’ development, after seven unsuccessful attempts to post the article below, I awake later to find it has been trashed.

Update: This is now my fourth attempt to post this piece – it keeps appearing, and then being pulled….as many of you may well have noticed.

Twitter’s incredibly feeble ‘justification’ for suspending my new account is as follows:

‘This account, @TheSlogtweets, was suspended for sending multiple unsolicited mentions to other users.

The mention and @reply features are intended to make communication between people on Twitter easier, and posting messages to several users in an unsolicited or egregious manner is considered an abuse of its use. Plus, it bothers other users!’

Absolute and utter bollocks: I have tweeted in precisely the way I’d done so @nbyward for three years before they f**ked up that account. They’ve suspended this account because I tweeted these observations yesterday:

  2. Slog gives up on Twitter, opens new account, decides to dump on Twitter from 75,000 feet http://wp.me/p18jPR-6in 

  3. And to top it all @nbyward, Twitter just told me they had a server error, but when I tried again that I’d ‘already tweeted that’…aaarrrgg

  4. Good evening @nbyward & his 2,271 users, this is @TheSlogtweets advising u that nbyward is now TheSlogtweets. Thanks 2 Twitter 4 this mess.

    But chiefly, I’ve been ‘suspended’ because I invited all Sloggers to move across from @nbyward to @TheSlogtweets….and in the warped world of Twitter, that represents ‘multiple unsolicited mentions to other users‘.

    Wrong, Twitter: what it represents is asking people who already follow me to follow me on another Twitter page. How can this be unsolicited?

    The internet needs your help on this issue. Not to help me – I can look after myself in a myriad other ways – but to make these bastards realise that they can’t behave like K’s accusers in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. I am asking all my Twitter and Slog followers to post this please:

    Slog fans and followers demand of @Twitter @Twittersupport @TwitterAPI that wrongfully [this is where (a) the rest of the appeal was erased as (b) the post refused to upload seven times and (c) when it did upload, three hours later it could not be found on my site]

    Any criticism of Internet suppliers – no matter how insignificant the source – clearly cannot be tolerated. So I’m asking you once again, if you’re on Twitter, to post there as follows:

    Slog fans and followers demand of @Twitter @Twittersupport @TwitterAPI that wrongfully suspended @TheSlogtweets be reinstated.