Tweeting About The Gov 2.0 Summit May Cause Serious Account Suspension

In an ironic twist of fate, a number of people related to O’Reilly Media, as well as others guilty of using Twitter to express thoughts and commentary about and from the Gov 2.0 Summit, have found their accounts suspended this morning due to unspecified ‘strange activity’.

That includes prolific (and real) Twitter users such as Tim O’Reilly himself, but also other accounts related to the publishing and event company, such as O’Reilly Radar’s Brady Forrest (@brady), authors like Sean Power (@seanpower) and generic accounts including @w2e (for the Web 2.0 Expo) and @gov2events.

Updated: most accounts that were wrongfully suspended are being reinstated one by one now.

Mosey along now, nothing to see here

Published author and blogging expert Debbie Weil also got banned from Twitter for the time being, and assumes it has something to do with the fact that the hashtag #gov20e was a trending topic yesterday and may have caused Twitter to automatically suspend the accounts of several users who have been keeping busy tweeting about and from the event using the identifier. Well in that case at least the company’s trying to combat spam.

It’s most likely something like that, or it might be related to the downtime and other issues that has been plaguing the service for some time now.

Either way, Twitter has a number of support tickets coming their way today.

(Thanks to Sean for letting us know)