Twitter Briefly Suspends Official Arbitrum Account

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The Twitter account for Arbitrum, the Ethereum rollup platform, was suspended on Monday. The Arbitrum Foundation said Twitter flagged the account in error, however, and it was reinstated within a few hours.

The co-founder of Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, Harry Kalodner, initially confirmed the suspension in a text message to CoinDesk, although he said he was unsure of Twitter’s rationale. “The Arbitrum Foundation which now controls that account is investigating,” said Kalodner.

The account was eventually restored. According to a representative for the Arbitrum Foundation, Twitter Support explained in a message that "[w]e have systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk, and yours was flagged as spam by mistake."

The Arbitrum suspension drama comes less than a week after the much-hyped rollout of Arbitrum’s new ARB governance token. The ARB launch, like similar buzzy token launches, was seized on by scammers who used spoof social media accounts and elaborate phishing schemes to steal from unwitting investors. Many of those scam accounts are still live on Twitter.

Togrhul Mahararramov, a developer for the Ethereum rollup platform Scroll, said Twitter was "consistently awful" for allowing scam accounts to proliferate while the authentic Arbitrum account was pulled offline.

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. https://t.co/e7Fxa5Xfcc

— Toghrul Maharramov📜 🇺🇦 (@toghrulmaharram) March 27, 2023

Arbitrum is a layer 2 rollup platform that allows users to transact on the Ethereum blockchain and pay lower transaction fees. It’s currently the largest Ethereum rollup by trading volume and total value locked, according to DefiLlama. The Arbitrum DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) – which is constituted by holders of ARB – took over development of the platform last week with the release of the token. Previously, the platform and its Twitter account were officially maintained by Offchain Labs.

UPDATE (March 27, 2023 20:11 UTC): Updates the story to reflect that the Arbitrum account was restored after Twitter's spam filter apparently flagged it as an error.

CORRECTION (March 27, 2023 19:18 UTC): A previous version of this story misidentified the tweet as from Kalodner, instead of Mahararramov.