The Twitter platform on Tuesday suddenly and mysteriously imposed temporary restrictions on the account of the well-known Palestinian-American journalist Mariam Barghouti, who was speaking about the protests against the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem.
During the temporary restriction, every tweet from the journalist was replaced with the following message: The MariamBarghouti account is temporarily unavailable because it violates Twitter's media policy.
Al-Barghouthi said, The platform asked me to delete some of my tweets, and the issue is not to suspend my account, but to impose general censorship on Palestinian accounts, especially in the past few weeks while trying to document the Israeli attacks on the ground.
The move was a mistake, the company quickly admitted, and its tweets were restored, but it appears that part of the incident was not wrong. 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 mask your Tweets.
The media or profile modifications claim policy states the following: If the account or media content is inconsistent 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 has violated. This means that if your account picture, title picture, or other picture you post does not meet Twitter's standards, the platform imposes a restriction on it and may also impose a restriction on your entire account until you fix it.
There are many examples over the past several years of Twitter choosing to place warning labels near offensive and harmful content, labels that still allow people to easily view tweets, but this was not the case for a journalist's account.
A Twitter spokesperson said, The policy is designed to better inform people of the actions the platform is taking, declining to say more.
It seems that this policy is old and should have been canceled long ago, but it was applied to Maryam Al-Barghouti.
A spokesperson for the platform refused to clarify what specific part of the company's terms of service was that Twitter initially believed Barghouti had violated.
Twitter also initially restricted Barghouti’s ability to tweet, retweet, follow, and like for 12 hours, and it is not clear why it was wrongly censored at first, and Twitter could not immediately determine whether this action was a human or an automated system.