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Twitter blocked our indie game account

107 points by jssnapiecek ↗ HN
8 days ago, Twitter suspended the 'Ticket to Europe' account (https://twitter.com/TicketToEurope). As the reason, Twitter gave a vague formula: your account broke the Twitter Rules. What rules exactly? It is not known.

We have already sent several appeals, but we are not getting any reply. Twitter Support also does not respond to us. We have the impression that for several days our efforts have only fallen into the abyss of algorithms. Several months of work on Twitter thus go to the trash. Is there any chance to get our Twitter account back? Is the only option to create a new account and start building a community from scratch? Do you have any experiences with similar situations?

Personally, it is hard for us to imagine breaking any Twitter Rules. Our game is a socially engaged project that we have been working on for 8 years (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2094580/Ticket_to_Europe/). We invest private savings in it and create it out of a sense of mission - it's a Text-Based RPG about refugees. The scenario was based on real stories of refugees we met during our research in a refugee camp. We are supported by various human rights volunteers and various NGOs consulted the scenario. We do not promote racist behavior in any way, on the contrary - our project was created precisely to increase social awareness and sensitivity to the drama that refugees face. How can such ideals conflict with Twitter's principles? Dunno.

Will publicizing such a case in the media increase our chances of recovering the account? Please help us, we are emotionally broken and a little desperate.

54 comments

[ 11.9 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] thread
uberman
I understand the temptation from the company's perspective to not provide support but from a user perspective I hate how modern services treat clients.

It is inexcusable to terminate an account without a clear explanation.

crest
Care to explain how you came to this conclusion: "It is excusable to terminate an account without a clear explaination"?
sodality2
I think they meant “inexcusable”.
uberman
Yes, thanks. Typed it in on my phone and must of fat fingered it or autocorrect opportunity.
azangru
Does a company owe it to their customers to provide good support, clear explanations about account termination, or a viable appeal process?

After all, I thought the hope was that if a company treats users like shit, they will leave it and find something better...

motogpjimbo
Unless you're paying money to Twitter, you're not their customer.
strathmeyer
Twitter's users are its product not its clients.
gareth_untether
Very bizarre situation and sucks that you're not given a reason. Could be that you used enough keywords to trigger a lock on the account.

Always a good idea to get people to sign up to your newsletter so you can share new social accounts and own the data!

pacifika
Best of luck you have my upvote.

This is the problem with privatisation of public services. Being the town hall of the online community is not a role that should be controlled by one vendor.

duxup
I certainly think there an problem with these kinds of bans.

But I also wonder what kind of public service do you feel is being privatized here?

Previous to internet platforms nobody was at the town hall advising their video games.

alistairSH
That’s the question, isn’t it?

Is Twitter (or Meta or whoever) closer to print media (ads and editorials, controlled by a company)? Or is it more like the proverbial town square (almost any speech is fair game (in US), controlled by government)?

I’d say the former, but have friends who strongly believe the latter.

q-big
> This is the problem with privatisation of public services.

The much bigger problem is that not masses of users quit such a problem if such a problem occurs. This is a signal to the market that such behavior is perfectly fine.

Markets have the "nice" property that they typically converge into what people demand by their choices. In this case Twitter delivers what the users chose.

danaris
> This is a signal to the market that such behavior is perfectly fine.

That would only be true in an ideal free market: that is, one where quitting did not cost the other users something significant, and where there was a competitor to go to that was identical except for the undesirable behavior.

Due to network effects, centralized communications platforms like this cannot be an ideal free market. Leaving means abandoning your friends and/or your audience/customers, which can be a huge cost.

Furthermore, the major competitors of Twitter (which...also aren't very much like Twitter) more or less have the same problems: inconsistent enforcement of often-arbitrary rules, with a totally opaque appeals process that doesn't necessarily involve humans at any level a regular person can reach.

It's really, really important to remember that all the market theory like this is only guaranteed to apply to a free market. Just because you have "a market" doesn't mean it's going to be any good at capturing the people's genuine desires.

mschuster91
Is it possible that you set your birthday to 8 years ago? Twitter auto-bans accounts that set an age below 13.

In any case, contact a lawyer to file for an immediate court order. That usually helps here in Germany.

jssnapiecek
We haven't set the birthday date to 2014 :)
criddell
> Is the only option to create a new account and start building a community from scratch?

Does it have to be on Twitter? Could you make it on a machine you control and then only use Twitter to advertise and notify?

If you have a personal account, you might want to use it to file a support ticket on their ads side. Say you wanted to promote a Tweet from your game account but the account was suspended just as you were about to purchase. Maybe the sales people have some power here.

jssnapiecek
We have a few other platforms where we promote ourselves, but so far Twitter has been the best developed. And the ban surprised us just a moment before launching our own Discord :)
freedude
Good point if the community is only on twitter then gamers like myself and others like me would not participate. As the politics of twitter are antithetical to my way of thinking.
[dead] rpgfugees
danivaz
The game is not "promoting" any of those things
jhugo
Did you even look at the game before posting this comment?
iLoveOncall
Can you have been copyright-struck by the famous board-games (and now video games) "Ticket to Ride"? They even have a "Ticket to Ride Europe", I wouldn't be surprised if that was the reason.

I also anticipate that you'll have to change your game's name if it ever catches their eye.

Now, I don't want to spit on the grave, but your Twitter had 469 followers according to Google's cache. You haven't exactly lost a massive community.

pasc1878
Or is the name thought to be near to the game Ticket to Ride: Europe. Which is what I thought when seeing your name https://www.daysofwonder.com/tickettoride/en/europe/

This was released in 2005 and the web version I think is before 2011

This name might well be trademarked as well.

amsterdorn
Yeah, this. Should come up with a more unique title.
imdsm
Personally, I don't see Ticket To Europe conflicting with Ticket to Ride: Europe. If it was Ticket to Europe: Ride then fair enough, but otherwise we're saying that all words/phrases have a margin around them, which I disagree with.
jssnapiecek
That was also our way of thinking when we chose the title for our game. However, perhaps we do not know enough about the law and are now learning a lesson.
freedude
Have you received a cease and desist letter from Days of Wonder? If not, then it cannot be a legitimate trademark violation. In the US they must defend their own trademark with a lawsuit or threat of one. If you are in Europe then your country may be different.
omgmajk
I pretty much just thought that ticket to ride had gotten their account suspended for a second. So I was confused for a little bit.
black_puppydog
That seems like a bit of a stretch for a platform with uncountable "E1on Musk" style accounts going untouched.
classified
Who would ever expect a platform to be consistent in their enforcement of arbitrary rules?
iLoveOncall
"Elon Musk" is not a trademarked name, "Ticket to Ride" is registered.
pasc1878
With trademarks it is up to the Trademark owner to take action not Apple so not a valid comparison.

I suspect Apple would act on a complaint from the owner here

jssnapiecek
It would be unfortunate because it would be difficult for us to go into a legal battle with such a big brand. On the other hand... how can you legally reserve the phrase "ticket to europe" which can literally refer to, for example, buying airplane tickets to Europe? This is an expression used in the daily life of millions of people.
iLoveOncall
You cannot reserve the phrase "Ticket to Europe". However, you can make a very strong case that a video-game named "Ticket to Europe" infringes on the copyright of your video-game named "Ticket to Ride: Europe".

I would strongly recommend you to change the name of your game before you face such issues (well, you may have already according to this thread), because if your game launches and is at all successful, you will 100% face legal action.

pasc1878
IANAL but I think it is not copyright that is here but Trademark. Copyright would be copying the game but even then I think you can use the same rules but not the same visual look.
differentView
I'm ignorant to indie game marketing. How important is Twitter to indie games?
jhugo
Surely being on Steam is much more important than being on Twitter. I play a ton of indie games but have never used Twitter and even if I did use it can't imagine looking for new games to play there.
jssnapiecek
We do not use Twitter to present the game directly to players, but rather as a networking platform. We are looking for Youtubers, streamers and journalists there, who in turn are looking for new content there.
matsemann
The thing is that Steam and other platforms use the amount of interest early on as a sign on how to promote the game. So a game just published with 50 purchases the first few hours, will get promoted to more gamers than a game with the same amount of sales spread over a longer time. Therefore it can be important to build a semi-big following on other platforms before release, to give that initial boost in the beginning.
pengaru
It can be a big deal if you're seeking to build a following to spam with updates about ongoing development / new titles. Which can have a huge impact on how successful your launches on stores like Steam are.

These days I suspect it's more common to lean on Twitch streaming of the development process to build a following. But that probably reaches a different demographic than regular twitter updates would.

ido
These days it's mostly tiktok and youtuber/twitchers making videos about your game. Twitter is more for talking to other game devs.
hurtuvac78
I created a Twitter account for à new company. My main goal was to lock the handle, and I did not do anything with it initially.

Two weeks later my account got suspended, because I supposedly broke some rules. But I did not tweet anything nor followed anyone. I appealed a few times, no responses.

4 months later my account was unblocked. No idea why.

This is ridiculous they can get away with arbitrary rules and no due process.

dewey
This happens very commonly if an account isn't used, I had it happen a few times too for my side project accounts but appealing always worked relatively quickly.
codeptualize
I had this happen with a new account (I didn't post anything yet), but in my case they responded pretty quickly to my appeal and re-enabled my account.
anonymous344
Google search with "TicketToEurope" seems to find only your twitter post and nothing else? This topic is hot potato and "no no" because Same Bankers and investors who own little bit of everything make billions of dollars every year to get refugees binto europe and especially into the nordic welfare system.

Think about this, every person in the system converts from 500 eur yearly turnover to 20 000 - 30 000€. And it does not even matter if they are criminals because they still will cause more turnover -> more debt to working people "government" -> more profits to investors.

beschizza
To an algorithm trained to look for such things, the title is suggestive of sex trafficking and human smuggling. Perhaps the machine is misinterpreting the game's social conscience as the thing it's criticising.
jssnapiecek
Interesting... we haven't thought about it before from this perspective. Could be true!
Dr_ReD
In 2023 regulating this aspects of big tech is gonna be nigh inevitable and they have brought it on themselves.