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9 days in Twitter purgatory

From Sep 23 2021 to Oct 1 2021, the @205_Sports account was blocked by Twitter due a tweet allegedly containing “privately produced/distributed intimate media of someone without their expressed consent”. As this was the second tweet in a 3 week period flagged by Twitter, the account was suspended for 12 hours.

The tweets in question are original animated @TacticalPad videos edited and produced using @Camtasia. We use @MeetEdgar for content distribution. 205 Sports has published @TacticalPad material for almost 2 years with no issues until recently.

It is our statement that Twitter’s flagging of the videos was incorrect based on false results from their automated tools. Both tweets were flagged within less than 1 minute of submission.

Attempts to appeal the flagging and locking of the account over a 9 day period have been unsuccessful – no responses from Twitter support. A total of 4 appeals were sent to Twitter using their ticket website. Per Twitter policies, accounts are locked pending a resolution of an appeal -or- deletion of the “offending” tweets. In order to reestablish account access, we have chosen to remove the tweets – which required a click through acknowledging a violation of TOS – which is not the case. The alternative was to continue to sit in a limbo state with no guarantee as to when the Twitter account would be reactivated.

Since we do not know exactly what about the animated videos resulted in flagging the account, we do not know how to modify our video product to prevent any future issues. We are currently looking at methods to produce videos that do not result in a further suspension of the 205 account.

To reiterate – the videos in question are all animated @TacticalPad content and do not include “intimate media”.

Below are screenshots of the various messages from Twitter.

Email from first tweet

Contents of first tweet

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Email from second tweet resulting in 12-hour suspension

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Video of second tweet

Email from appeal

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Three additional appeal requests were sent during the 9 days that the 205 Twitter account was disabled with no response.