• Twitter temporarily suspended the official Arbitrum account on Monday.
• The suspension was caused by a mistake in Twitter’s spam detection system.
• The suspension came less than a week after the launch of Arbitrum’s new governance token, ARB.
Twitter Briefly Suspends Official Arbitrum Account
On Monday, March 27th, 2023, the Twitter account for Ethereum rollup platform Arbitrum was temporarily suspended due to an error in Twitter’s spam detection system. The co-founder of Offchain Labs and creator of Arbitrum, Harry Kalodner, initially confirmed the suspension in a text message to CoinDesk but did not know the exact reason why it had been flagged as spam. After investigation from the Arbitrum Foundation, however, it was revealed that their account had been mistakenly flagged as spam and restored within a few hours.
Launch of ARB Token
The incident comes less than a week after the launch of Arbitrum’s new governance token ARB on March 21st. This much-hyped rollout was seized on by scammers who created elaborate phishing schemes with spoof social media accounts in order to steal from unaware investors. Unfortunately many of these scam accounts are still live on Twitter today.
Reaction From Developers
Togrhul Mahararramov, a developer for another Ethereum rollup platform Scroll commented on this situation saying “Instead of suspending all the scam Arbitrum accounts, Twitter decided to solve the problem once and for all – suspend the actual Arbitrum account… I’ll give props to Twitter. They are consistent… consistently awful.” This statement brings attention to how ineffective twitter is at taking down these fake accounts while flagging legitimate ones instead.
Implications of Suspension
The implications of this short-lived suspension may be minor but reveals some flaws in twitter’s system when it comes to detecting authentic versus fraudulent accounts and could have long lasting effects if not fixed soon enough or addressed properly by twitter support staff members.
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