Twitter admits it mistakenly removed Ukraine open source intelligence accounts

Enlarge / Screencap from a tweet by @OSINT_Ukraine reporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine and incursion into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. (credit: @OSINT_Ukraine)

Twitter said it had mistakenly suspended the accounts of open source intelligence reporters posting about Russia's military build-up around Ukraine, leading to many of them accusing the Russian state of launching a bot" campaign against them.

Based on publicly available satellite imagery, open source reporters have used social media to supply a steady commentary on the activities of Russian forces near the Ukrainian border, providing a valuable alternative source of information to Western intelligence reports.

The people behind the suspended accounts said they believed they had been the target of an attack by Russian bots-computers that mimic the activity of human users-that had mass-reported their content as being suspicious. This led their content to be removed automatically by Twitter's moderation technology.

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