Free Speech Absolutist ExTwitter Suspends Navalny’s Widow’s Account After She Speaks Out, Blames Spam Tools

Look, we all like to point out that when dealing in content moderation, mistakes are inevitable. But, I always find it amusing when people insist that mistakes must have been for nefarious purposes. Over the last few years, people, including ExTwitter owner Elon Musk, have insisted that stories like Twitter's decision to restrict the sharing of the NY Post article on Hunter Biden's laptop were some nefarious plot, rather than a mistake.

Indeed, he suggests that stories like that one were part of the reason why he had to set fire to billions of dollars to take control over the site to bring free speech back."

But then we get a story about how, just a day after she created an account to speak out against the murder of her husband, Yulia Navalnaya (the widow of Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny) had her account shut down, claiming that it violated the X Rules." This happened just after posting a video of Navalny's mother outside the penal colony where Navalny had been imprisoned until he died, calling for Putin to release his body.

As people on ExTwitter started to complain, the account was reinstated, and a nameless Twitter Safety account tried to chalk the whole thing up to its spam detection tools.

The wording is a bit odd, sounding like a rushed-out message, but whatever:

Our platform's defense mechanism against manipulation and spam mistakenly flagged @yulia_navalnaya as violating our rules. We unsuspended the account as soon as we became aware of the error, and will be updating the defense.

And... this seems totally plausible? A new account, suddenly getting a ton of attention and retweets might plausibly be linked to spam-like activities. I don't know what tools the company is now using for spam detection, but it's not out of the realm of possibility that a spam tool judged the rapid rise in activity around a new account to be indicative of a problem, and with the company cutting pretty much all human staff who might review such a decision, the account might have just been auto-suspended.

But, here's the thing: Elon refused to ever give the benefit of the doubt to the previous management of Twitter, so I'm not sure why anyone should give the benefit of the doubt to him.

If Elon (and his supporters) were quick to blame every old suspension, even ones that were just legitimate mistakes, on Jack Dorsey" or the woke mind virus" or the FBI" or Joe Biden," then should Elon really get the benefit of the doubt when they happen on his watch?