According to TechCrunch, Twitter disclosed that it mistakenly deleted some accounts on Wednesday that shared details of Russia's military activities. After Twitter users @667_mancer accounts were temporarily suspended, Bellingcat researcher Eric Toler called attention to the accounts that had been falsely suspended earlier on Wednesday. An open-source intelligence or "OSINT" account that recently refuted the Russian government's claims about the Ukrainian attack was also suspended at the same time, as was a French-language account that shared images and other data from the region.
While some Twitter users claimed that the swift suspension of a handful of OSINT accounts was the result of massive reporting, the company also admitted its mistake on Wednesday.
In a statement provided to TechCrunch, the company explained: "We have been proactively monitoring new claims that violate our policies, in which case we have taken wrong enforcement actions against some accounts. We are in the process of reviewing these actions expeditiously and have proactively reinstated access to some of the affected accounts. ”
The company added that reports that these accounts have been suspended due to "coordinated bot activity" or "large-scale reporting" are not accurate. Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of website integrity, explained in a tweet that Twitter's human review team made the mistake in an effort to proactively detect and remove misguided photos and videos — a common, potentially dangerous form of misinformation known as "manipulated media."
OSINT analysts and other misinformation researchers often share tampered photos and videos in the process of debunking them. OSINT has emerged over the past decade as an important tool for recording conflicts and refuting error messages in real time. While this kind of data collection previously required high-level resources, the proliferation of social media and readily available satellite imagery has made it possible for online OSINT groups to track in real time what governments around the world are doing.
Bellingcat, the most well-known organisation working on OSINT, has investigated everything from the attempt to assassinate Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny to the attack on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.