Hey there, this is Morna Simpson aka @girlgeeks on Twitter.

There seems to be a lot of confusion, especially on Hacker News, about the suspension of my Twitter account. I am a bit cut off at the moment so only catching up with this myself.

So, for the record…

I first knew that my account had been suspended around 2am GMT this morning as a friend sent me a text to let me know.

As far as I am aware I did not receive any advance warning from Twitter, but on signing into my account and clicking on the Suspended Account link, I was sent an email with the following information:

“We understand that you’re contesting an account suspension. Please be sure to read this entire email; you will need to take further action in order to reopen your ticket for your account to be reviewed.

 

If your account was suspended for aggressive following behavior, you should have received an email notification to the address associated with your Twitter account. Please reply to this message and confirm ALL of the following:

 

 

 

• You’ve removed all prohibited following automation from your account, and will stop any manual aggressive following behavior.

 

 

 

• You’ve reviewed our Best Practices page: http://support.twitter.com/articles/68916

 

 

 

• You understand our policies and will not engage in any prohibited following behaviour.”

You will also see from my account that I seem to have lost both my 7000 Followers & 7000 peeps I was following.

Having read through the support pages etc etc I am baffled as to why my account has been suspended. I have responded to Twitter and I am awaiting the outcome…

But it is lovely to know that there is so much support from people online who know me or know of me.

It is true that I have on rare occasions been “harassed” verbally (online & off) because of my area of (voluntary, unfunded) work with Girl Geek Scotland. Our aim is to help with gender balance issues across the tech & digital sector.

I try not to take these verbal accusations personally – when you are online you must remember that you may be speaking to someone who is young or vulnerable. If there is a malicious verbal attack online I can choose to ignore by clicking on the block button. However, I’ve found that on most occasions any misunderstandings and preconceptions can be ironed out with a little discussion.

So although I am happy to join in a healthy debate, I make an effort to disassociate myself from others who call themselves “Feminist” but may or may not actually hold any helpful feminist beliefs or take what I consider appropriate and helpful action in this area. This may be why I rarely – if ever get targeted personally.

Girl Geek Scotland is voluntary unpaid work. We had a fallow period for around two years, while I was getting surgery, and we are only just getting up and running again. That is why our blog was recently thrown up with the new domain. Our previous blog was out of date and had been subject to attacks. However, these looked more like brute force attacks than any deliberate targeting.

So the lack of content on this site belies our history of events and workshops, of which I am quite proud. We mainly run events that aim to inspire and encourage networking in the cross-section between digital, business and creativity. We have attracted very high profile people in the past… again I am very proud of this. You may know of Anne Winblad, Heidi Roizen, Karen White and Wendy Lea… If not they are worth looking up as they are fantastic speakers and our panel chair Dr. Suzanne Doyle Morris made them shine

I suspect the suspension was an error on Twitters part. However, there is the possibility of someone making false and malicious accusations against me. I only think this is a possibility because of my previous experience with Twitter which you can read about here > Who Owns Your Twitter User Name

I hope to be able to add back news to this blog when I get the time.