During the war between Russia and Ukraine, a remarkable move came from the world’s most popular microblogging platform, Twitter. Twitter suddenly started blocking accounts sharing images from Ukraine. This situation faced the reaction of both Ukrainians and Twitter users who tried to follow the agenda. Because the blocked accounts were the accounts of OSINT analysts who collected and shared data from publicly available sources.
Upon the reaction of the incident, some statements were made on the Twitter front. In an initial statement by Twitter spokesperson Elizabeth Busby, “We proactively monitor emerging narratives that violate our policies, and in this case we have taken enforcement action on a number of faulty accounts. We are rapidly reviewing these actions and have re-enabled access to a number of affected accounts. Claims that it was the result of campaign or collective reporting are not true.” statements were made.
A detailed explanation was made to prevent similar incidents
Twitter officials, who admitted that account closures were made by mistake, published a flood they prepared in Ukrainian so that a similar situation would not happen again. . In this flood, it was explained how to ensure account security and what to do to avoid the filters of both automatic software and moderators.
Oliver Alexander was one of the people who shared within the scope of OSINT, also known as Open Source Intelligence. The account of Alexander, who shared images from the region, was reopened after being closed for a while. Alexander said that he could not obtain clear information about the suspension of his account.