Twitter mistakenly blocks accounts sharing videos of Russian invasion of Ukraine

The foreign minister of Ukraine said that Russian forces have begun a "full-scale invasion" of the country.

The accounts that shared footage from conflict zones were affected by the suspensions.

In this instance, we took enforcement action on a number of accounts in error because we had been monitoring emerging narratives that were violative of our policies.

We are reviewing these actions and have already restored access to a number of affected accounts.

When asked by Insider what rules the accounts were thought to have broken, a spokesman pointed to the synthetic and manipulated media policy that applies to misinformation.

The accounts were affected by the blocks.

Kyle Glen, an OSINT researcher whose account was blocked for 12 hours, said that it was no coincidence that more than 5 accounts covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine were locked at the same time. What are you doing to stop the abuse of the report system?

The affected accounts had not been the subject of mass reporting according to Yoel Roth, the head of site integrity.

A small number of human errors as part of our work to address manipulated media resulted in these incorrect enforcements. He said that automated enforcements are not triggered based on report volume because of how easy it would be to game that.