Twitter Suspends NewsBusters; UPDATE: NewsBusters is Back

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UPDATE: Newsbusters's Twitter account has been reactivated.  Follow Newsbusters here.

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NewsBusters’s Twitter account was suspended today by Twitter for an as yet unknown reason.

Conservative social media accounts have been attacked the past few years by liberals who flag them as spam.

Matthew Sheffield wrote in 2008:

Because of the proliferation of fake blogs, spam comments and phony videos, many interactive sites have added mechanisms to prevent a group discussion from being hijacked by allowing regular readers to "flag" things they come across that are offensive, obviously spam or violate copyright laws.

…

On this new frontier of free speech, it appears extreme liberals are the biggest offenders. Back during the presidential primaries, an entire group of blogs that refused to support Sen. Barack Obama in his quest to defeat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination were wrongly labeled as spam and taken down.

The Google-owned YouTube seems to be the biggest battleground for flag spammers. Dozens of pro-life videos there have been marked as "offensive" or containing "mature content," usually without any merit whatsoever. In many cases, complaints of the video producers have fallen on deaf ears.

It is unknown whether NewsBusters was flagged as spam, and a search of @spam and @NewsBusters on Twitter search doesn’t show anyone flagging it as spam through that means.

Twitter did accidentally suspend a number of accounts on July 5:

Earlier today, we accidentally suspended a number of accounts.

We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accounts—we expect this to be completed in the next several hours.

NewsBusters had 734 followers at the time of its suspension.

Some Twitter users have been protesting Newsbusters’s suspension.

stixXxnstones said:

Oi, @newsbusters is not @spam. Twitter, WE WANT TEH NEWSBUSTERS BACK ;(

If you want to complain to Twitter through Twitter, address Tweets to @twitter.

 

Update 19:12 | Matthew Sheffield. Looks like the account is back. Good news!