h/t Colonialista – “Oh, they’re gonna hate their new rules”

Twitter acknowledged on Friday that a new policy it unveiled this week to protect users from harassment is being abused by malicious actors — days after journalists, left-wing activists and self-described “sedition hunters” reported their accounts had been locked for sharing publicly available images of anti-maskers, anti-vaccine protesters and suspected Capitol insurrectionists.

The acknowledgment highlights how Twitter has been caught flat-footed by what it described in a statement as “a significant amount of coordinated and malicious” activity that led to “several errors” in Twitter’s enforcement.
“We’ve corrected those errors and are undergoing an internal review to make certain that this policy is used as intended — to curb the misuse of media to harass or intimidate private individuals,” Twitter said.

Unveiled on Tuesday, Twitter’s new policy prohibits the sharing of images of private individuals without those people’s consent. The rule was created, Twitter initially said, in a bid to prevent its platform from being abused to harass and intimidate people, particularly women, activists and minorities.

But right-wing groups and anti-mask activists have quickly determined that the new Twitter policy offers an opportunity to strike back at those who might draw attention to their real-world identities. And in a matter of days, they established a coordinated campaign to flood Twitter with complaints that left-wing activists, Jan. 6 investigators and journalists covering rallies have published their faces without consent in violation of the new rule.

In January, Samuel Braslow was covering an anti-mask protest at a Los Angeles mall for the Beverly Hills Courier, the 56-year-old local newspaper where he is a staff reporter. During the public event, Braslow tweeted a video of a standoff between anti-maskers and a mall official — a common practice in the age of digital reporting.
Braslow couldn’t have known that, this week, someone would file a report about that same photojournalism and cause Twitter to lock down his account. The complaint led to Braslow being unable to tweet until he either successfully appealed the report or deleted the old tweets. He was stuck.

Good work, lads.