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Twitter’s new private image rules are already causing problems

Last week Twitter updated its private information policy to include video and images of private individuals without their consent on the list of things users can’t do.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for that new addition to be abused by ne’er-do-wells on the internet. At the weekend Twitter suspended the accounts of 12 journalists and anti-extremism researchers by mistake reports The Washington Post. The mistake aspect of this is that the reports that lead to the suspension of the accounts were bogus.

The reports that were submitted were submitted by followers of far-right activists and white supremacist accounts. These followers were urged to file reports on accounts that identify and monitor extremists, by those account owners.

Twitter didn’t reveal how many reports were received it did, however, state that it would share more in a review of the incident at a later stage.

While new tools and features often have teething issues, Twitter has a habit of releasing features that fail to land or are loaded with issues. There was a fear that this policy update could be abused and just a few days later it was.

While Twitter does test features with a small group of users, it’s clear that wider testing needs to be done before they can be abused in the wild.

With Parag Agrawal being selected to replace Jack Dorsey as Twitter’s chief executive officer last week, we hope that issues with new releases at Twitter become fewer and further between.

It’s unclear whether all of the accounts that were suspended have been reinstated.

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