An email from the Data Protection Commission in Ireland, which oversees Twitter's behaviour in Europe under GDPR rules, brought into focus the reality of dealing with unaccountable social media platforms. After's Twitter's decision to permanently suspend my verified @alekboyd account, I filed a GDPR request with the watchdog. What I wanted, still want, was to recover my account's data, tweets, pictures, etc. Twitter had granted my data request, but for some reason decided to format the data for download in .txt files, rather than in customary JSON files. This made the process of rebuilding account's timeline in a local machine extremely time consuming. I put this to the Commissioner dealing with the issue in Ireland, who emailed recently to say that Twitter had in fact said it had provided data in JSON format, which is a lie, as evidence provided to regulator showed.
Use of my current Twitter account, @infodi0, is weird these days. Sometimes I can't see replies to my own tweets, or I open the app to see in the timeline tweets from a month ago, rather than last posted. Often, when I open the app, I see account has been locked and multiple requests to delete tweets are presented. Twitter's favourite is "Violating our rules against posting private information." That rule makes a breach to post information -from criminal probes in various jurisdictions- about Venezuelan corruption.
We want to leave a record here, so that these information doesn't disappear down Jack's rabit hole.