Twitter Inc. said today that this week it had mistakenly removed content from its platform and suspended users who had been tracking the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Such users had been accessing satellite images that showed Russian movement along the Ukraine border, sharing the important images on social media platforms. This type of open-source intelligence, OSINT, has already proved that at least one Russian claim of a Ukraine attack was not true.

One such account was taken down, with Twitter leaving the message that it had violated the company’s terms of service. The owner of that account opened a new one, stating that he thought what had happened was the work of Russian bots. The bots, he assumed, had mass-spread his posts, which is a transgression for Twitter.

A comment on that page read, “The best aggregator out there of user-generated content from the Donbas over the last 8 years is getting suspended/locked out of his account, so if someone from Twitter is reading this, wave your magic wand or whatever to let him back in.”

Another person covering the conflict called it an “attack on journalism and people,” saying that people “rely on these accounts to post the facts over other news outlets.” He added that Twitter has “a responsibility to ensure its own reporting systems aren’t being misused by individuals or nations.”

But Twitter soon explained that what had happened had been a mistake, telling media that it now knew that there had been no use of bots to mass-promulgate information. It said around a dozen accounts had been removed, possibly all in error, explaining to The Financial Times that it was currently “expeditiously reviewing these actions.”

It seems some of the accounts were back in action after a day of being down. “I am back again after having been locked out twice in 24 hours,” said one user. “First time for a post debunking the ‘foiled sabotage/gas attack’ and second time for a post debunking the ‘Ukrainian attack into Russia.’”

Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth then tweeted on the matter, admitting that the mistakes weren’t just the fault of Twitter’s algorithm, something one might have assumed. “A small number of human errors as part of our work to proactively address manipulated media resulted in these incorrect enforcements,” he said. “We’re fixing the issue and reaching out directly to the affected folks.”

The post below that noted that “Twitter needs to do a better job.”

Photo: Jeremy Bezanger/Unsplash