Twitter mistakenly suspends accounts after extremists abuse new privacy policy

Twitter recently updated their privacy policy and banned sharing media of private individuals without consent. This means that you can ask Twitter to remove someone’s tweet if it includes a photo or video of you, if you didn’t give permission. The policy’s wording was a little vague though, allowing tweets to stay up if they “add value to public discourse”.

Now, far-right extremists are abusing this power by reporting anti-extremist accounts and getting them suspended. These anti-extremist accounts usually post footage and proof of extremist rallies, and some of these accounts have been suspended for violating the new private media policy.

This outcome is exactly the opposite of what Twitter wanted. Initially, they said the new rule helped to “curb the misuse of media to harass, intimate, and reveal the identities of private individuals,” which can have “a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities”. The fact that far-right extremists were able to get their way means that something went terribly wrong.

The extremists used external messaging services like Telegram or Gab (an alt-right social network) to organise these ‘report attacks’. This resulted in Twitter getting a “significant amount” of wrongful reports and mistakenly suspending a dozen accounts.

Twitter stated that they “corrected the errors and launched an internal review”, but did not mention how they fixed it. If this keeps happening, more journalists who cover extremist activities will be in danger of being silenced. Twitter needs to make a statement about their internal review quickly, or else the platform will get even worse (which is difficult to imagine).

Also, I can’t help but feel bad for Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal. It’s like Jack Dorsey knew this was coming and said “It’s up to you now!”.

[ SOURCE, IMAGE SOURCE ]