We hoped it wouldn't come to this.
We hoped that Twitter would realize that the suspension of our account one week ago was unjustified and inappropriate, or perhaps a simple mistake made by some auto-sorting algorithm. They didn't.
Finally this morning on June 30th, we received a short and cryptic message from the social media giant. The message (pictured below and merely signed "Twitter") falls incredibly short of both justification and explanation of their actions. Additionally, it makes it clear that they will no longer allow us to voice opposition to the decision, and they will no longer listen to our appeals. We will of course continue making appeals, but we have a strong suspicion that they will be ignored and Twitter intends for our account to remain in a state of "permanent suspension."
sus·pen·sion /səˈspen SHən/ - The temporary prevention of something continuing or being in force or effect
What is Suspension?
Because there is no such thing as "permanent" suspension, we are calling this violation of our freedom exactly what it is: A censorship, a silencing, a ban. Twitter may feel that with our mere 8000 followers we are not worth their time or individual attention, so we must let them know in any way we can that this is unacceptable behavior.
Does this corporation feel like it will ruffle fewer feathers by using the word suspension, when permanence is built into its policies? Here's the sequence of events: First, our Twitter account was suddenly suspended on Wednesday of last week (6/23/21) without warning. We were not told what rules or terms we were alleged to have violated. We immediately sent an appeal, to which we received an automated message as a response that simply told us why accounts are usually suspended. We then received no response for nearly 7 days, despite sending multiple messages and more appeals. Finally, when today's response came, we were told curtly that we were guilty of "multiple and repeated" violations of the rules. No specific rule or violation was cited.
What is Splinterlands?
Splinterlands is a game, like countless other games that are allowed to exist and post their content freely on Twitter. The only differences between Splinterlands and most games involve the facts that Splinterlands cards are NFT assets and they have real money value.
Giving Twitter as much benefit of the doubt as we can, our best guess at a reason is Twitter wrongly decided that we are involved with the sale of regulated goods and/or services. Basically, they made the incorrect assumption that we sell a financial product or service, which is regulated by the SEC...
"if your account is dedicated to the sale of illegal or regulated goods and/or services, your account may be suspended permanently."
-from TWITTER RULES
Future Resolution
We still believe that this is a misunderstanding on Twitter's part. We are not a financial service company. We are a game. We sell Booster Packs and Starter Packs. All secondary values of cards are determined by the community alone, and we do nothing to manipulate them. We make no claims of future value, and we do not speculate on future prices of certain cards. Any card pricing data that has been shared via Twitter has been carefully presented as historical secondary sales data from third party sites. We have never even used the word "investment" in a single Tweet. We will continue to hold out hope that this issue can and will be resolved, that we'll be tweeting again someday.
The new problem is Twitter doesn't seem to care enough to deal with us. If we had been given a warning or reached by a person in the first place, we could have corrected this misunderstanding then. But now that they have taken both our voice on Twitter and our ability to appeal their one-sided decision, we need your help.
How You can Help
You can help us by sharing our articles and our news. You can help us by tweeting and commenting, using the hashtag #freesplinterlands. You may see more everyone tags than usual in the Discord community in the coming weeks, and we hope that you will pay attention, sharing the things that need sharing and repeating the messages we need to spread.
The crypto community is still small. Within that community, the world of NFTs is even smaller. And within that community (smaller still) is the little world of blockchain gaming and playing-to-earn, in which you are all still early adopters. In moments like these, Twitter is demonstrating the absurd degree of power they hold over our voices and our projects.
If they can do this to Splinterlands, one of the most trusted and well-established NFT projects in the world, they can do it to any crypto project they choose, and for any reason. We can live without Twitter, but we hope that the rest of the crypto community understands and shares our concern.
Twitter NFTs: No Friggin' Tact
To make this escalation even worse, Twitter announced on the very same day to nearly 60 million worldwide followers that they are releasing NFTs of their own.
This bothers us, and hopefully it bothers you too. With one hand, Twitter is auto-suspending the accounts of some of the most successful and well-established NFT projects in the industry, and with the other hand they are launching their own NFTs. The disconnect that this implies between the company's action and attention is astounding and tactless.
Don't worry. As we've said before, Splinterlands is stronger than ever and always growing. We're breaking records, dropping updates and constantly adding value to your gaming experience. We want our community to be loud about this not because we are desperate, but because we are concerned. Let's not let these giants push us around, and let's show them that it's not the number of followers, but the quality of the following that really matters.
By the way, we've sent some special prizes to @jesterago, @sinistry, @homesteadhacker, @enjar and @revisesociology. Thanks for helping us spread the word with our last post!
Thank you all for your continued support!
Rewards for this post are burned.🔥
The Crypto Class Action is progressing and I hope to get a judgement that I have a prima facie case in the next few months.
When I do, I'll be writing to Twitter (who are not currently a Respondent in the case) offering them an early multi-million dollar settlement instead of facing a multi-billion dollar claim that will destroy them.
Do you want me to make #freesplinterlands a part of that settlement offer?
I was thinking in your judicial action when this happened, this is imo the best course of action and should be supported from every Hiver or/and SL player as the way to reestablish our account. Twitter (as any other big company) won't listen to our complains in their social media, we haven't the required number to make them think this twice, but a litigation like yours may change their mind as there might be a lot of money involved (that's the only language that they understand).
I would love to see this become a thing. I have been supporting The Crypto Class Action for a long time and wish you the absolute best of success with it even though the odds are are stacked against you. !PIZZA
@apshamilton! I sent you a slice of $PIZZA on behalf of @vimukthi.
Learn more about $PIZZA Token at hive.pizza (1/10)
You mentioned that "Twitter is auto-suspending the accounts of some of the most successful and well-established NFT projects in the industry". What other accounts were suspended? If there is a clear pattern, that, combined with their own NFT launch, could be the basis for a very nasty anti-trust suit for using their market dominance to bull their way into another market. That's a big no-no.
This is part of the existing cartel anti-trust case I've been running for 3 years already. See my comment in this thread and @jpbliberty account for details.
This is clearly a monopolistic practice to guarantee their position in NFT's, they're trying to avoid any possible competence. Legal actions are required to avoid this, any other move will be insignificant for them.
Would be interesting to investigate! Also they obstruct a communication channel (provided by them I know) but they still cause monetary loss! This is also a no no.
Clearly they see Splinterlands as a threat to their potential new NFT. Shame they have to be this way.
I still personally do not believe whatsoever that this was an mistaken action, else there would be hundreds of thousands to millions of others who would already have been freed from this unwarranted censorship. I'm still permanently banned for posting footage on January 6th exposing some of what happened during the Jan 6th event. I even tried to appeal, and they said I was banned for posting information Twitter had deemed to be dangerous. Big tech just gets whatever way they want and do not think twice about suppressing anything threatening to their power and the power of their buddies that stick with them and allow each other to get away with everything they've achieved so far.
Can you guys share that rules link... please. Just in case it goes to a different page they mandate we should agree with when using their services.
This is going to be very interesting...
Sure, it's THIS ONE
Yep, its the same one... ridiculous that they have this in that page:
And this one is like... the biggest joke of the ecosystem of twitter in one phrase! LOL There are SOOOO many posts doing this that is crazy to see this rule and not effective following of the rule LOL...
Either way, twitter is just being that annoyingly manipulator. They have their own strategy, but we are too many, and they can't block everyone otherwise they are killing themselves, so, I would say, the strategy would be to just find ways to adapt to their idiocrasy rules and show them they are the ones that should change/adapt.
instead of a link I will provide bullet points of the "certain types of
Goods or services covered under this policy". They include, but are not limited to:
counterfeit goods and services*;
drugs and controlled substances;
human trafficking;
products made from endangered or protected species;
sexual services;
stolen goods; and
weapons, including firearms, ammunition, and explosives, and instructions on making weapons (e.g. bombs, 3D printed guns, etc.)
Where amongst this list of human depravity my Byzantine Kitty NFT belongs is anyone's guess but I promise an explanation will give me endless amusement.
Which none make sense for Splinterlands... but I see that every day on twitter on other accounts that keep not getting blocked.
~~~ embed:1410376634864226309 twitter metadata:RW5qYXJHYW1lc3x8aHR0cHM6Ly90d2l0dGVyLmNvbS9FbmphckdhbWVzL3N0YXR1cy8xNDEwMzc2NjM0ODY0MjI2MzA5fA== ~~~
The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the person sharing the post on Twitter as long as they are registered with @poshtoken.
@chrisroberts hope, this means I need to retweet the first one tweet?
I could write a long text.
In short WEB2 sucks so much. Remember the time people/businesses were skeptical to give all the data to facebook and co?
Sooner or later, we will have a better version of Twitter on Hive.
I'm close to done with Twitter and the rest of mainstream social media sites. Just sickening how these companies behave. Censorship, information manipulation, and pushers of state approved propaganda!
CLOSE to done??
I never even signed up in the first place!
Just quit , dood.
Make a big "I'm quitting this dump; if you wanna contact me, my email is [email protected] and my postings will be on Hive.x/bitdood" post and get out of there while you're still able to speak and tell everyone where you're going.
If you just get dead-censored sometime, you won't even be able to tell anyone how to contact you. You'll just become a canceled person.
I use it to promote #HIVE though, my posts and also some affiliate marketing. I wish the crypto community would stop screwing around and start supporting blockchain based social media and projects that support crypto instead of these mainstream data thieves and surveillance systems that pass for social media sites.
I know what you mean, but face it. People who use Twitter in 2021 are a very certain type of person. The more a person uses Twitter, Facebook, or those other big-platforms, the less I want them here. They'll just bring the disease with 'em.
I guess I can't condemn you making money using big-platforms, but still, is that really the right thing to do?
Keep fighting, their decision is unjust and their unwillingness to engage is frustrating. #freesplinterlands
That’s the same kind of response I got from PayPal after they shut down my business account after almost 15 damn years. Sucks guys, but I am sure the Hive Twitter army will help out on that end. Maybe we need to move to new horizons to promote… Twatter is trash anyway.
I totally agree. We've got a lot of other options and even more on the way. Unfortunately, no one can even come close to the sheer number of impressions we can get for just sharing news on Twitter.
I'm very positive about all this. It just leads us to better things, and we've already gotten a lot out of Twitter for free. :)
Holy sh*t! Thanks, man!
I hope this gets the attention it deserves. This is hands down the most bizarre rollercoaster of a trip I’ve been on, and I worked on a military psyche unit.
Keep it balls out and on point! 👊
!PIZZA
@splinterlands! I sent you a slice of $PIZZA on behalf of @drunksamurai.
Learn more about $PIZZA Token at hive.pizza (1/10)
Splinterlands is too big and that's why Twitter afraid of.
The more people know about Splinterlands, the more people know about Hive & Hive frontend (like DBuzz, it's pretty much the enemy of Twitter in the future).
Web 3.0 complaining about Web 2.0 is, at best, a waste of time.
It's time for everyone to abandon twitter and start giving value to decentralized platforms.
Every person who uses twitter ends up giving them more money, while the decentralized platforms are unsupported by not having users.
We'll get there gradually, but it's nice to have access to free impressions on an audience of millions of fresh people. That's how we get people to learn about Splinterlands and Hive in the first place :)
Oh and I forgot the !LUV
Twitters censorship is out of control, my account was banned as well. Nothing we can do, sucks!
Twitter is for Twits.
#freesplinterlands
Project blank is the future... #freesplinterlands.
It means use @dbuzz instead https://d.buzz it's hives own twitter . We have more than enough billions of users to poach from telegram and discord alone .. not to mention youtube where we need Good old self succin @jerrybanfield
Posted using Dapplr
@chrisrice would be happy to see D.Buzz promoted (here)! 😅
Twitter obviously don't care and this suspension is just a bot thing. Any reasonable human can see @splinterlands is a genuine account trying to spread the word on a great blockchain game. Ridiculous.
They know very well that this cannot be stopped.So the only attempt they can make is to slow down the advance of the world of blockchain and gaming on the blockchain.
Shared on twitter tagging twitter support and twitter!
I suggest everyone who is not afraid to loose their own account to tag twitter and twittersupport!
@splinterlands, you were given LUV from @solymi. About LUV: https://peakd.com/@luvshares
In the end you cannot have a free public forum that is privately owned by a corporation, though that is the status quo on the web today. We will only have that with platforms owned by the users, ie. Hive.
Let's make some noise! ^^
~Josie~
They literally had no reason to do it, they did it because they could…. Wtf?…
Dbuzz > twitter hahaha
Click here and vote me for witness
Tweeting this, let them know we are not small to be trampled or blasted or burnt. Our monsters would do that to them.
Probably they are afraid of what decentralized and free media can do to them. Lucky we have Hive where posts or acounts cannot be banned so easily. But unfortunately it still needs time that people understand that.
How or why would they ban a game company? People trolling I can almost get, but this makes no sense.
Twitter is the worst social media i have ever used. They often suspend users account without any reasons. @dbuzz is the only solution to project our voice
My comment here: