On Saturday evening, I was disturbed to discover that our OpenBenches Twitter Account had been suspended!
https://twitter.com/edent/status/992803869032927234
To be clear, OpenBenches posts photos of benches. That’s it. No porn, no spam, no encouraging malicious behaviour. It’s just pictures like this.
https://twitter.com/openbenches/status/992408273973317637
I went to appeal the suspension, I quickly got back an automated reply denying the appeal.
This was baffling! The account is connected to a valid email address and working mobile phone number. There were no added apps which could have been used for spamming. Nothing that broke the rules.
I kicked up a bit of a stink on Twitter – and I’m grateful that so many people Tweeted their support. I dropped an email to a few people I know at Twitter, but it is a Bank Holiday weekend, so I didn’t expect any of them to answer.
I filed another appeal the next day, which was also swiftly denied. But, hey, it’s still a long weekend.
And then, without warning, I got this:
I’ve no idea whether a human reviewed it. We were now free from Twitter jail! But it came with a cost. Despite the promises, the followers never returned.
We only had a few hundred, not bad for a parochial project on the psychogeography of memorials, but now we had zero.
So, if you were following us – please follow us again! If you weren’t, now’s a good time to follow us on Twitter! Or, submit a photo of a bench using your mobile phone at https://OpenBenches.org.
Yes, I know. We should redecentralize and put our content on Mastodon, or the BlockChain, or some other convoluted platform which has no users. But that’s just not practical for a small project. We have limited technical resources and have to go to where the people are.
We have a website, and lots of Open Data – if you want to help syndicate us to multiple platforms, please file a pull request!