As a regular poster on Twitter, I use two accounts, @Thomasthetaxi and @Taxileaks to advertise new articles. This has proved to be a very successful way of attracting regular readers to this Blog.
But, over the weekend, i experienced a problem with my accounts that took me out of the system for hours on end.
Every time I posted links to articles exposing Sir Peter Hendy's indiscretions with the £140 an hour hooker, Rachael Grundy, my account was frozen. In one instance for ten hours.
This has happened three times over the last two days.
At first I was slightly bemused. Although my tweets can sometimes be highly critical, they do not contain profanity, pornography or racism.
So, in due course, I put in a complaint to Twitter asking for an explanation as to why my account had been suspended.
I received what seemed to be a standard reply;
Hello, If you're writing in about thomasthetaxi being suspended, this account is not currently suspended; please review any previous communications from Twitter for clarification about what the reason for the suspension may have been.
Having never previously received a communication from Twitter, this reply was about as clear as mud!
On the occasions that my accounts were finally unblocked, all tweets made during the suspension flooded out, posted all at once...all, except the ones containing links to Hendy stories.
Who has the power to authorise this type of abuse of the right to free speech?
And why try to block a story that is already in the public domain, albeit in just three news papers.
Even the two journalists who broke the original story are curious as to why so few other media outlets picked the story up.