My name is Wes Miller. Until this afternoon, I had over 1400 Twitter followers, a little over 1000 people I was following, and 21,666 status updates.

I say until this afternoon because my account has been suspended. Without any warning. Without any email or explanation to follow. Without any response other than a hollow echo from an automated Zendesk responder at Twitter.

I’m disappointed. I’ve used Twitter for over three years. During that time I’ve been vocal about many things. The BP spill, GM food/crops, the TSA, Twitter itself, plenty of times about Google, Android manufacturers, RIM, sometimes Apple, and even Microsoft, who in a roundabout way is responsible for my current job. I’ve been vocal about food, politics, the environment, technology security and security theater. I’ve criticized a lot of things. But I believe what I haven’t done is be offensive. Twitter works because, for the most part, it’s a crowd of your peers that you can learn from, and hopefully help them learn. I spend a lot of time on Twitter. Some might say I waste a lot of time on Twitter. Poh-tae-toh/poh-tah-toh. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

One thing that I have been very vocal about is Twitter itself and how they do/don’t aggressively stop spammers. I don’t have an internal perspective on what Twitter is doing to stop spam. But I do have enough of a security background to tell you that their approach to suspending aggressive spammers from the system is either slow, lax, intentionally forgiving, or perhaps a combination of the three. As a long-time Twitter user, it annoys me to see the volume of spam accounts slow leak to the level it does, and affect how I use the service. I don’t apologize for how critical I have been of this, as I don’t currently believe that Twitter is policing spammers as fast or as aggressively as they should be. Was this the reason I was suspended? I’d be rather shocked (and disappointed) if that was the case, but at this point, I’ve got no leads to go on.

Yet here I sit, hypocritically wishing Twitter would suspend more accounts, and simultaneously wondering why mine has been suspended. I have enjoyed using Twitter, the things I’ve learned, the friends I’ve made who have taught me much, made me laugh, made me think, and sometimes made me sad.

If I said or did something that Twitter believes justifies my account being suspended, I believe they owe it to me to tell me in short order what it was, and how or if I can address it to have my account restored. If this was an error on Twitter’s part, so be it – but it should not take hours to get me the courtesy of a response explaining, “ooops – we goofed.”