from Hacker News

Ask HN: How can X suspend paid accounts without explanation?

by santa_boy on 1/17/25, 12:49 AM with 12 comments

• by toomuchtodo on 1/17/25, 1:19 AM

  It is a privately owned platform and there is no legal or regulatory requirement that provides for much recourse. You could try a credit card dispute, a complaint with your state’s Attorney General, and an FTC complaint. Considering the state and incoming admin, the first might be the most effective. I would also not recommend giving them any more money in the future, but of course that’s a personal choice.

• by DrillShopper on 1/17/25, 2:20 AM

  From the Terms of Service: We may suspend or terminate your account or cease providing you with all or part of the Services at any time if we reasonably believe: (i) you have violated these Terms or our Rules and Policies, (ii) you create risk or possible legal exposure for us; (iii) your account should be removed due to unlawful conduct; (iv) your account should be removed due to prolonged inactivity; or (v) our provision of the Services to you is no longer commercially viable. We will make reasonable efforts to notify you by the email address associated with your account or the next time you attempt to access your account, depending on the circumstances. To the extent permitted by law, we may also terminate your account or cease providing you with all or part of the Services for any other reason or no reason at our convenience. In all such cases, the Terms shall terminate, including, without limitation, your license to use the Services, except that the following sections shall continue to apply: 2, 3, 5, 6, and the misuse provisions of Section 4 (“Misuse of the Services”). If you believe your account was terminated in error you can file an appeal following the steps found in our Help Center (https://help.x.com/forms/account-access/appeals). For the avoidance of doubt, these Terms survive the deactivation or termination of your account.

  They seem to be able to terminate your account for any legal reason or no reason.

• by beretguy on 1/17/25, 2:54 AM

  Congratulations! Take this as an opportunity to stop using Twitter. Sorry you lost some money but not using Twitter is worth it. Maybe you could file a charge back on your card?

• by blackeyeblitzar on 1/17/25, 2:01 AM

  If you’re asking about the legality - it is probably legal since companies build in a lot of rights for themselves into their terms of service. It’s not fair but every company does it unfortunately. It needs regulations to be fixed.

  Personally I am not a fan of bans on users, especially from social media, since social media is the only meaningful way to exercise freedom of speech these days. But we need to classify them as utilities or common carriers to have better protections.

• by numpad0 on 1/17/25, 2:37 AM

  Oh, they do that all the time. It doesn't matter if you had the loser check or not. I see popular users announcing and relaying bans all the time on Twitter. It's been that way since late 2000s.

• by smcin on 1/17/25, 1:45 AM

  > One valid thing, is I was doing a login automation on my personal laptop browser.

  Ok you were violating the ToS: why? Did you have a legitimate reason to? Were you posting ads or automatically crossposting content?

• by distracted_boy on 1/17/25, 9:07 AM

  > One valid thing, is I was doing a login automation on my personal laptop browser.

  Well there you go. Twitter and X have had big problems with bots, so obviously they are cracking down on that behavior.

• by oladipomd on 1/17/25, 8:48 AM

  My 17 year old account was suspended because ...

  I won't ever spend a dime on X. Can't risk it.

• by deadbabe on 1/17/25, 2:34 AM

  Do a credit card dispute and you will almost certainly win.

• by notepad0x90 on 1/17/25, 1:33 AM

  Use bluesky. you can take your data,it's a bit decentralized. They didn't fire thousands of employees after musk to support users better.