Twitter's power to suspend without reason

A few weeks ago, I went live with a website that should prove to interact well with SkyRank. It's called HedgeMall and its a free site that publishes proprietary hedge fund content we own, as well as aggregates google organic returns of hedge fund and finance jobs, schools and contacts. It's primarily a google ad-sense site that is very easy to use. I decided to also publish our Twitter account updates and instructed our programmers to build that into the site. I also had seen Twitter accounts with tens of thousands of followers and had met people who had subscribed to auto-follower software such as one I decided to subscribe to called Twollow. Twollow claims to be white-listed (which means Twitter approves of the site), and works really well to group other Twitter users with similar interests as your own. It allows you to choose keywords, similar notatations as meta-tags but applied to the social network, and thus seems right in line of acceptable behaviour, i.e. nothing too wrong here. In fact, it seems also an extension of news aggregator software, simply natural algorithmic methodologies to leverage the power of the internet to aggregate content, in this case the aggregation of users with similar interests. Furthermore, what is SEO all about, if not figuring out a way through meta-tags, link exchanges and other network techniques to market your site to the webisphere.

So, after about 1 week of subscribing to Twollow with our @HedgeMall account, there were about 400 followers, most of whom were interested in finance, employment, hedge funds, or education.

Two days ago, I logged into the @HedgeMall Twitter account and was so surprised to find it was suspended. There was a message from Twitter stating something to the effect of, "We've decided to suspend your account for a minimum of 30 days. We're not sure if this is the correct thing to do, but, we think we're right. You can send us an email if you disagree (of which I sent three over four days without any personal reply), but likely we won't give you a reason as to why we decided to Suspend your account." (Translation: Tough Luck if you have 400+ followers for a new legitimate site that you recently launched, and if there's any collatoral damage to your brand. We don't care.) Or, at least that's how I've felt over the past five days.

I was tempted to @message all of my indirect contacts to Twitter, those whose updates I've admired and followed, the VCs the CEOs, and their Friends.

So, we cancelled our Twollow account, and decided to publish our @SkyRank updates on www.hedgemall.com instead for now, for lack of a better solution.

I really do disagree with the Suspension Policy of Twitter. It think it spits in the face of everything the service is supposed to stand for. I would feel a bit better if rationale was put behind the suspensions.

After all, it seems the reason Twitter cannot give personal reasons, is that they are deploying similar "AutoSuspend" algorithms, as Twollow and other AutoFollow softwares deploy with "AutoFollow" algorithms.

I continue to be a big fan of Twitter and use it daily, but the Suspension Policy makes little sense to me.