Twitter suspends several crypto accounts

Twitter has suspended several accounts belonging to people involved in the crypto sector.

Perhaps the most sensational suspension was that of the famous PlanB profile, which today wrote: 

“Just woke up to see my account suspended and all 300k followers gone. No explanation from twitter, no dm, nothing. Does anybody know what happened? More accounts having this problem?

Jack [Dorsey] HELP!!!”

Just woke up to see my account suspended and all 300k followers gone. No explanation from twitter, no dm, nothing. Does anybody know what happened? More accounts having this problem? @twitter, @twittersupport @jack HELP!!!

— PlanB (@100trillionUSD) March 10, 2021

However then PlanB tweeted shortly afterwards saying that the account was quickly restored and followers instantly reassigned.

He also went on to explain that the reason for the suspension was that Twitter had marked these accounts as spam by mistake, asking for the blue tick of verified account to fix the root of the problem.

So the reason for suspension was twitter flagged our accounts as spam by mistake. Note that victims of scammers and impersonators think it is us and report the real accounts. @Twitter @TwitterSupport @jack a blue "verified" checkmark would solve this and prevent a lot of harm. pic.twitter.com/JFMtKC4sOB

— PlanB (@100trillionUSD) March 10, 2021

As stated by Twitter, this was a mass operation carried out tonight on many accounts found guilty of spam, which is most likely handled by automated bots that can make mistakes like this. 

Crypto accounts suspended by Twitter

In addition to PlanB’s account, Twitter also suspended other crypto accounts, such as that of Willy Woo. 

Ditto. My account was suspended for ~6 hrs.

I went through the process mentioning @100trillionUSD was taken down also and this was the email response they gave when they reactivated.

Let's hope at least the scam accounts get under control. https://t.co/sW1BHkxXmN pic.twitter.com/JGeVPaCnDN

— Willy Woo (@woonomic) March 10, 2021

The curious thing is that Twitter’s founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, is a known supporter of Bitcoin, so these bans are certainly surprising. Nevertheless, it is highly likely that these are just errors made by the bots that perform these checks automatically.

This was not actually an operation aimed specifically at the crypto sector. In fact, the ban also affected many other accounts that have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies. In fact, of the famous crypto accounts, only a few actually fell victim to this error. 

It is clear that social platforms still have great problems identifying users who violate their terms and conditions of use, or even laws, so that errors such as these are unfortunately still widespread. 

Furthermore, customer support does not seem to respond very quickly to requests, so much so that even the CEO of The Cryptonomist has been locked out of her account for over a month.