Twitter suspended the @Bitcoin Twitter account, which is run by an anonymous user, over the weekend. The account was briefly taken over by a user who claimed to be Turkish, then a user who claimed to be Russian, before apparently being restored to its previous owner Monday afternoon.
“We do not comment on individual accounts so nothing to share,” a Twitter spokesperson said when asked about the suspension. “That’s some bullshit if you ask me,” the user behind @Bitcoin tweeted. “I’d like to know why my account was given to someone else, and then when it’s reinstated I’m missing 750,000 of my followers.”
There have been calls to report the @Bitcoin account before. In January, a user called on others to report the account, calling it a “Fake @Bitcoin account.” Some members of the community agreed, while others objected, saying the owner of the account should be able to tweet about whatever they want. As with many online conversations about bitcoin, it’s difficult to tell who is real and who is a sock puppet; the thread was eventually locked because the moderators claimed users were “brigading and vote cheating.” Similarly, on Twitter there was a flood of tweets from accounts claiming that they had reported @Bitcoin for spreading what they viewed as propaganda for Bitcoin Cash. Others said they reported it for “spam,” “hate speech,” or “price pumping.” “I complained to Google, because when I would Google bitcoin I would get a prominently displayed Twitter feed of @Bitcoin with three separate posts, and always the first one was that bcash was the real bitcoin,” reads one Reddit comment. “I found it a fraudulent statement intended to confuse and induce newbies to buy their cheap knock off product.”
The @Bitcoin account had more than 821,000 followers when it was suspended. Those followers disappeared, but it appears that Twitter is slowly restoring them.
Credit : https://theverge.com
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