After three days of forced silence on the micro-blogging site, today Twitter has apologized and fully reinstated Empower Texans’ (@EmpowerTexans) feed and the personal accounts of the Empower Texans team (@mqsullivan, @A_Kerr, and @DustinMatocha).
Here is the general timeline of events surrounding this rather odd and concerning episode:
On Monday, without advance notice or notification, Twitter shuttered all of our Twitter feeds – both personal and organizational.
After discovering (from comments and accusations made by liberal bloggers and activists) that our accounts were suspended, we engaged in the process of submitting the necessary appeals to Twitter through their website.
Knowing that we have always operated our official and personal Twitter accounts in good faith fully within Twitter’s terms of service, we continued to press our case.
By Tuesday,our unjustified Twitter outage drew the attention of many of our friends and some in the media. So much so that even conservative blogger and commentator Erick Erickson addressed it in a post on RedState.com Wednesday evening.
Wednesday, after receiving no feedback or justification from Twitter for over 2 days, Empower Texans President, Michael Quinn Sullivan received a vaguely worded auto-response style email suggesting the suspensions were possibly due to a list of unsubstantiated violations of Twitter policies. Again, we contended that we were not aware of any instance of violation, and requested specifics.
Interestingly enough at this point, we were able to obtain the contact information for an actual human being at Twitter to provide some clarity.
Thursday morning The Drudge Report also took notice of our situation.
Shortly thereafter, Twitter released our accounts back to us apologizing for the inconvenience.
We would like to thank all of the folks who supported us by drawing attention to this issue and those of you who called on Twitter for an explanation and our reinstatement. Twitter heard you, and ended up judiciously restoring our ability to tweet.
