It’s reportedly taken less than a week for members of the far-right to abuse Twitter’s updated private information policy to have journalists and researchers banned from the platform.
Twitter announced on Nov. 30 that it was updating its private information policy to prohibit the sharing of “media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted.” The company said it would make exceptions if the tweets were about public figures, however, or if the media in question was captured during public gatherings such as protests or sporting events.
Those assurances did little to alleviate concerns about how the updated policy could be abused, though, and now it seems those fears were justified. The Washington Post reports that Twitter was bombarded with “coordinated and malicious reports” soon after the policy was changed. The company ended up suspending numerous researchers and journalists as a result.
Vice reports that efforts to get researchers and journalists banned from Twitter began soon after the updated policy was announced. The report says “one well known neo-Nazi” sent a Telegram message urging people to report a list of “several anti-fascist accounts,” as Vice described it, at least one of which Twitter actually suspended after the new policy was implemented.
Twitter said in a statement to Gizmodo that “The Tweet in question was not in violation of our private information policy—our teams took enforcement action in error. We’ve sent a communication to the user noting this error.” Gizmodo says it sought comment on multiple actions that resulted from this new policy, however, and Twitter didn’t clarify which one it meant.
All three reports were published on Dec. 3—less than three full days after Twitter’s policy was updated. That might be a record for least amount of time between a tech company announcing a policy change, being warned that someone might abuse that new policy, and that policy being subject to coordinated abuse despite the company’s assurances that everything would be fine.
Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
