After Twitter “mistakenly” deleted Russian and Ukrainian accounts in the midst of the war, the social network seems to be rectifying the path.
Yesterday, some users from Russia and Ukraine reported that their Twitter accounts had been temporarily suspended, in periods of 12 and 24 hours, which is why they accused the social network of sabotage and even censorship.
To mention an example, last night, February 22, the investigator of OSINT, Kyle Glen reported that his account was locked for a period of 12 hours. Likewise, security analyst Oliver Alexander stated that, in fact, his account was suspended a couple of times in 24 hours, classifying the event as censorship and sabotage.
I am back again after having been locked out twice in 24 hours. First time for a post debunking the “foiled sabotage / gas attack” and second time for a post debunking the “Ukrainian attack into Russia”. @Twitter needs to do something against these locks now.
— Oliver Alexander (@OAlexanderDK) February 23, 2022
However, through a statement, Elizabeth Busby, a Twitter spokeswoman, stated that these measures were taken “by mistake” and that it was not an attempted sabotage.
“We have been proactively monitoring emerging narratives that violate our policies, and in this case, we took enforcement action on multiple accounts in error. We are quickly reviewing these actions and have already proactively restored access to several affected accounts. Claims that the bugs were a coordinated bot campaign or the result of mass reporting are inaccurate,” Busby explained.
Now, Twitter has admitted that the accounts were indeed suspended because they shared information about Russian military movements.
These accounts have already been restored, but according to what is reported TechCrunchcontained an aggregator (software that aggregates a specific type of information from multiple online sources) of posts, which were generated by users from Ukraine and accounts owned by people conducting open source intelligence investigations (OSINT) for the purpose of to debunk false claims and news.
Even Twitter’s head of integrity, Yoel Roth, stated that it was the result of “a series of errors by human moderators who proactively address the issue.”
For the second time in a day, an attack by Russian bots lock the account @666_mancer. I ask for maximum retweets and requests to @twitter and @TwitterSupport to fix the situation pic.twitter.com/UNYoJnkgJv
— 667_mancer (@667_mancer) February 23, 2022
On the other hand, he made it clear that Twitter is aware of what is happening between Russia and Ukraine, and, to this end, made a series of tips for users so that they can protect their accounts at a time as complex as we are experiencing and, above all, because Ukraine has been a constant victim of cyber attacks in recent weeks.
Likewise, the social network shared links to its support page for those whose accounts were blocked and, as if that were not enough, it gave some tips on how to deactivate your location information and how to delete old posts.
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