A rash of new suspensions for X (Formerly Twitter) accounts is running through the community.
This issue started with Andrew during the Space Call Marathon meant to bring awareness to MMTLP and attract Elon Musk to the room. During the 50 hour event his account was suspended yet he was still allowed to host the Space.
Later we found JoRL, who co-hosted much of the efforts for the marathon Space call, was suspended as well. Their efforts made some noise. Andrew reported that they had over 12 million MMTLP and #20Minutes hashtag impressions in 2 days. But does going trending now come at a risk?
Community member Guess Who posted notices of two additional suspensions which added Go Orogrande! and Finn to the list. Since these accounts are now suspended, it’s pretty much impossible to look through their content that happened just prior to suspension.
And now, days later there have been dozens of suspensions as reported by Dawn:
Here is the partial list:
@just_in_k33 @Chemita38_
Recently, X has been rolling out new terms of service messages to users that must be accepted and are set to go into effect the end of September. There are additional clauses in these new terms that gives X more power to just about everything.
We read through the terms of service and their Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy document carefully.
A lot of what the MMTLP community does is advocacy. We are sending messages to politicians and lawmakers, and quite honestly, a lot of them. Repeatedly. Could this be the reason some accounts are getting suspended? Or have some nefarious actors been on a campaign to report MMTLP users and get them suspended?
There’s some strict guidelines on sending high-volume unsolicited replies or mentions. AKA the entire campaign by Andrew to get Elon Musk to the Space call revolved around the community repeatedly tagging @elonmusk to make him aware of the movement.
Here are some of the X guidelines that may be a problem for our community:
Posts and Direct Messages
You can’t misuse X product features to disrupt others’ experience. This includes:
- sending bulk, aggressive, high-volume unsolicited replies, mentions, or Direct Messages;
- posting and deleting the same content repeatedly;
- repeatedly posting identical or nearly identical Posts, or repeatedly sending identical Direct Messages;
- repeatedly posting content or sending Direct Messages consisting of links shared without commentary, so that this comprises the bulk of your Post/Direct Message activity; and
- Posting an existing phrase or content in a duplicative manner, whether individually or in concert with other accounts. Learn more in our copypasta and duplicate content policy.
Remembering back through some of the messages sent by JoRL, Andrew and others participating in that campaign, one could probably deduce that if they wanted to, X could use these guidelines against MMTLP users that are simply trying to advocate for change by repeating messages with just slight variations in a call to action.
User Dizzy seems to suggest it’s tagging Elon that caused the biggest problem for some of these supsended accounts.
To be clear, we don’t know that this is the cause of these suspensions for sure. There are also rumours that certain individuals have been taking advantage of the situation and reporting these MMTLP users as violators, just to get them suspended.
While we can’t stop or slow down our fight for justice and advocacy, we would ask X users to be cautious and read over these terms and keep them in mind when making future X posts.
Most of the guidelines are clearly directed at people that might be harrassing users or using bots to post or “scrape” the former Twitter. Of course, our community is not doing anything like this.
However, Elon’s mobile phone going off for 50 hours straight with mentions while he’s counting his money might have been enough to exercise these terms against some of our community members.
Hopefully everyone gets back online soon so our community can once again become whole.