Recently Twitter has been making efforts to clean up the system and get rid of spam accounts. While rather laudable, their method is not without challenges.

Last week, during the Gov2.0 Summit downtown, several users who chose to live-tweet the event using the hash tag #gov20e found themselves on the wrong side of the twitter fail whale (or rather, the Twitter Foul Owl. See image, courtesy of TechCrunch).

Due to what Twitter saw as “strange activity,” they temporarily suspended the accounts. Several reports claim that the accounts have since been reinstated.

The #gov20e hash tag was a trending topic last Tuesday, and there were several rather-prolific tweeters among those who had their accounts suspended. Maybe twitter just couldn’t imagine that there were enough media geeks in the government to reach the level of a trending topic, and assumed it had to be fake. After all, who could blame them? <wink>

From TechCrunch: Tweeting About The Gov 2.0 Summit May Cause Serious Account Suspension