On Tuesday, Twitter suddenly and mysteriously imposed temporary restrictions on the account of the well-known Palestinian-American journalist Maryam Barghouti, who was speaking about the protests against the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem.
During the temporary restriction, every tweet from the journalist was replaced with the following message, "Maryam Barghouti's account is temporarily unavailable because it violates Twitter's media policy."
Al-Barghouti said that she received a request from the platform to delete a number of her tweets, and considered that the issue is not about suspending her account, "but rather about imposing a general censorship on Palestinian accounts, especially in the past few weeks while trying to document the Israeli attacks on the ground."
The company quickly admitted its mistake, and Barghouti's tweets were recovered, but it appears that part of the incident was not a mistake.
Although Twitter may have taken action on the journalist's account by mistake, there is a certain situation in which Twitter reserves the right to hide the journalist's tweets.
A spokesperson for Twitter told Motherboard in an email, "We have taken enforcement action on the account to which I mistakenly and unintentionally referred. It has since been avoided."
Twitter's policy requiring media or profile modifications states the following: “If the account or media content does not comply with our policies, we may make it temporarily unavailable and ask the violator to edit the media or the information in the account to comply with our laws while clarifying the policy that the account or media content violated. ".
This means that if your account picture, title picture, or other picture that you post does not meet Twitter's criteria, the platform imposes restrictions on it and may also impose a restriction on your entire account until you change it.
Gaza doesn't need ood packages and charity, as much as it needs:
1- immediate stop of the deliberate bombing of civilian lives and infrastruction.
2- lift the military-imposed siege, which is employed as collective punishment on 2 million Pals.
Get at the root, not the leaf.
- Maryam Barghouti (@MariamBarghouti) May 17, 2021
The Twitter platform categorically refused to clarify to the "Motherboard" website what specific part of the terms of service it believed Barghouti had violated.
There are many examples over the past several years of Twitter choosing to place warning stickers near offensive and harmful content, labels that still allow people to easily view tweets, but this was not the case for the Palestinian journalist's account.
"The policy is designed to better inform people of the actions the platform is taking," a Twitter spokesperson said, declining to say more.
It seems that this policy is old and should have been canceled long ago, but it was applied to Barghouti.
Twitter initially restricted Al-Barghouti's ability to tweet, retweet, follow, and like for 12 hours, and it is not clear why it was imposing a wrong censorship on its account, and it was not able to determine whether this procedure was a human or an automated system.