Twitter policy that may temporarily censor each of your tweets

On Tuesday, a well-known Palestinian-American journalist reporting live from protests near Jerusalem was suddenly and mysteriously silenced on Twitter – replacing each tweet with “@MariamBargouti’s account temporarily unavailable because This violates Twitter media policy. ” That was a mistake, The company quickly accepted, and her tweets were quickly reinstated.

But it turned out that the incident was a part of No A mistake. While Twitter may have mistakenly acted on this person’s account, there is actually a special situation where Twitter reserves the right to make your tweet disappear. And – if you ask me – it’s super, super dumb.

Twitter pointed me this page And This particular image As an example of the policy, which looks like it may be up to October 2017:

There, the “Media or Profile Editing Required” policy reads: “If an account’s profile or media content does not comply with our policies, we may make it temporarily unavailable and will require that infringers add media to their profile Or edit the information our rules. We also state what policy their profile or media content violated. “

Or, in plain English, if your profile picture, header image, or other picture you post does not meet Twitter’s standards, Twitter will not just censor that image – it will censor your entire account until Can do until you fix it.

Instead of just dropping the image and perhaps providing an explanation, why would Twitter need to notify people of a bad image on every single tweet of an author? Over the past several years, we have seen that Twitter has opted to place warning labels near objectionable and harmful content, labels that still allow people to easily view those tweets.

When I raised this question, a Twitter spokesperson would only say that the policy is designed to “better inform people on the actions taken by Twitter”. The company refused to say much.

The most liberal interpretation I can make is that it is an old, outdated policy that should have been retired long ago.

Twitter initially restricted Barghouti’s ability to tweet, retweet, follow and like for 12 hours, as per the screenshots he provided to them. Report door. It is unclear why his account was initially censored by mistake; Twitter could not immediately say whether it was a human action or an automated system.