For many years, ON/NO has had a Twitter account (@ottawanaturists) which, over time, built up a substantial following.
Earlier this year, Twitter deleted our account for a deemed violation of their terms of service (the details will be explained below) and we were unsuccessful in our efforts to have the account restored. We have recreated the account with the same handle as the old account (@ottawanaturists). However, all the content existing in the account at the time it was deleted has been lost as have all the followers and followed accounts.
Any external links to the account (such as those on our website) should still work but should you notice any that are broken, please report them to webmaster@onno.ca. However, any internal Twitter links will no longer exist. So if you had been following @ottawanaturists from your personal Twitter account, you will have to refollow us.
Why was the account deleted?
Following a lengthy investigation and after sifting through and piecing together numerous scraps of evidence, here is what we believe happened:
At the time the account was originally created, Twitter required merely that the creator of an account affirm that they were at least 13 years of age. Earlier this year, Twitter changed this policy to require that the creator had to also provide their date of birth. This change was also applied to existing accounts and access was blocked to any account which did not have a date of birth on the profile. To unblock access to the account, a user had to provide their date of birth.
A requirement that was not obvious is that, in the case of an organizational account such as ours, the date of birth not be the date on which the organization was founded but the date of birth of the sysadmin. Not only was this not obvious, it also does not take into account that an organization may concurrently have multiple sysadmins or that the sysadmin function may pass from one individual to another over time. Furthermore, it does not consider that a sysadmin who currently meets the age requirement may not have met the age requirement on the date that the account was originally created by a predecessor (the importance of this latter point will become clear later).
One of our volunteer sysadmins, noticing that access to the account had been blocked, entered a date of birth that was more than 13 years ago but not more than 13 years prior to the date on which the account was originally created. Based on this latter point, Twitter deemed that the account had originally been fraudulently created by an individual under 13 years of age and locked the account due to this deemed violation of its terms of service.
It is possible to unlock a Twitter account but it must be done within 30 days of being locked at which time the account is permanently deleted. At the time, the volunteer involved was not aware of the reason the account had been locked (the reason was only determined weeks later following some extensive and lengthy sleuthing) and actually thought the account had been locked due to some other action the volunteer had taken. The volunteer submitted a request to Twitter to unlock the account, receiving in return a (possibly automated) reply that the request was unrelated to the reason for locking the account (without providing any indication of why the account had been locked — completely unhelpful to the extreme). We have been unsuccessful in making any further progress in our efforts to have the account unlocked.
One must keep in mind that in dealing with social media companies it is difficult — if not impossible — to contact a human being. All transactions are likely automated and handled by bots.
As our efforts have been to no avail, we have deemed that attempting to restore the deleted account is a lost cause and therefore have recreated the account to as closely as possible mimic the deleted account.
So we invite you to once again follow us on Twitter (@ottawanaturists).