Mystery one has been solved.

Associated Newspapers Limited have, according to the fake Daily Mail blogger, got Twitter by the short and curlies and demanded they rename the ‘dailymail_uk’ account. So they did.

He writes:

All of a sudden and with no warning I was locked out of Twitter.

I checked through my email archives. One minute I was receiving email to @dailymail_uk like this…

A scant 45 minutes later, I was receiving emails to @notdailmail_ukI checked, double checked and – for the hell of it – triple checked all my inboxes, labels, spam folders and deleted items. There was no sign of twitter sending me any notification as to when or wherefore they had disabled my account.

Ouch. He pressed Twitter for a reply and got this explanation:

Hello,

We did send out the following notification yesterday. Did you check your spam folder?

We received a letter from the Associated Newspapers Limited, part of Daily Mail & General

Trust Plc, legal adviser. regarding Trademark violation and impersonation.

http://twitter.zendesk.com/tickets/5377 :

Hi

We’ve received a complaint from a fellow Twitterer . It has come to our attention that your Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/dailymail_uk

is in violation of our basic Terms of Service, specifically article 4 which mentions impersonation:

4. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.

In this case “impersonation” is the issue. Impersonation is against our terms of service unless it’s parody. The standard for defining parody is, “Would a reasonable person be aware that it’s a joke.”

To settle this issue we’ve removed the profile image and changed the user name to “notdailymail_uk” in the full name and username fields in order to eliminate confusion. You can change your real and user names to something else if you’d like:

1. Visit Twitter.com/settings
2. Edit the Full Name and Username fields
3. Click “Save”

Please honor Twitter’s Terms of Service accordingly. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

Thanks,

Twitter Support

(The bold is added for emphasis.)

So the question is: Would a reasonable person be aware that it’s a joke?

Tricky. One commenter pointed out that of the massive Daily Mail readership, there aren’t too many reasonable people to pick from. And, chances are, they’re not on Twitter either.

He expresses concern that Twitter cannot be trusted when they have the power to just tell you to clear off. But I wouldn’t be alarmed. Most businesses in the world operate with a ‘Management reserves the right to not serve/sell’ etc get-out in place — and this doesn’t seem to be any different.

But it begs the question: How do you measure satire?