Thousands of Accounts Suspended.

So after this weekend's mass culling of Twitter accounts, something Twitter had warned in a very low key announcement, many businesses are waking up this morning to locked Twitter accounts. And for some of them, no fault of their own!

The problem that arose, was in order to reduce spam on Twitter's 330+ million user network, they decided that anyone using multi-post methods were in breach of there terms and conditions, therefore had their account suspended.
The worst hit by these were accounts that were mass managed. An example of this: A social media company who managed say, 20+ accounts for various clients may send out a tweet to all the accounts with a motivational quote or infogram. These would all be flagged by Twitter and then subsequently locked. The irony of this, is that it was possible to do this using Twitter's own 'Tweetdeck'
Once an account is locked or suspended the only way forward would be to unlock by using a phone verification system, where the user receives an unlock code to their phone or mobile via a text or voice call. But due to the mass amount of locked accounts, this verification system was somewhat sporadic, with users either not receiving a text or when requesting a voice call with the unlock number, getting called with a long silence.
Of course, for an individual who is happy to persevere, unlocking the account, although a long process of hit and miss could easily achieve the reinstatement of their beloved Twitter account.
However for social media companies, lets say who manage 50 or more accounts, they would need 50 unique phones to do so on behalf of their clients, who quite frankly had contracted out the management of their accounts as they were either too busy or lacked the technical knowledge to manage themselves.
In effect, most of Twitter's advertising revenue come from these companies who manage their advertising budgets and campaigns for their clients, so basically Twitter was shooting itself in its foot.
The full extent of the lockdown is still unknown but I am sure we will be hearing more about this over the coming week.
Was this a good move by Twitter? Yes, they needed to clean up their database of users, but surely a warning email or direct message first to let tweeters know what was happening would have been less devastating for the 1000's of genuine Twitter accounts that were caught in the firing line? And surely their blanket targeting has resulted in the loss of millions of revenue for Twitter themselves?
Only time will tell. I would hope that Twitter themselves put a more robust system in place in the future, warning customers of any transgressions rather than not letting them pass go and go directly to jail.

Image Credit: Pixabay http://ow.ly/4qln30j1m8Z