I am not sure which forum to post this to -I thought here would be best
Activist Ali Alexander’s Twitter was supposedly “banned” from Twitter in part for organizing the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally/riot/coup(?)back in 2021. I don’t agree with him at all but I followed him on Twitter to know what he and his supporters were doing.
And the other day I noticed he got his account back when he showed up in my Twitter feed. And I noticed others Twitters have “banned” have popped up in my feed as well.
So that means when Twitter “bans” someone they still keep their account data and can re-activate it at will. I find THAT completely disingenuous on Twitter’s part and think they should have permanently deleted all their account data when they were “BANNED”.
I would assume these people were just temporarily banned. If Twitter said they were permanently banned then I agree with you, however they can just create pseudonym accounts and continue to spew their garbage until somebody figures out who it really is.
As a former pseudo-database guy, there’s a fairly common school of thought in database management that says you never delete records. You flag them as inactive or obsolete or banned or something, but you don’t delete without a good and compelling reason.
In the case of Twitter, they also want to maintain those records as evidence that the user in question did, in fact, violate standards of conduct that were agreed to in a user agreement for liability purposes. And given the fact that Twitter is being used by government officials and agencies to communicate official statements, directives, and information means that Twitter may actually have a legal obligation to maintain information integrity of all records to ensure that they cannot be arbitrarily modified or deleted.