Twitter said it mistakenly blocked accounts sharing videos of Russian invasion of Ukraine

• Twitter said it erroneously blocked accounts sharing footage from Ukraine.
• It pushed back against claims that the accounts had been the targets of mass reporting.

Twitter said it mistakenly blocked accounts that were sharing footage from Ukraine — where, Ukraine's foreign minister said, Russian forces have begun a "full-scale invasion."

The suspensions affected open-source-intelligence accounts, which share footage posted to social media from conflict zones.

"We've been proactively monitoring for emerging narratives that are violative of our policies, and in this instance, we took enforcement action on a number of accounts in error," a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to Insider.

"We're expeditiously reviewing these actions and have already proactively reinstated access to a number of affected accounts," the spokesperson added.

When questioned by Insider on what rules the accounts were thought to have broken, a spokesperson mentioned Twitter's policy on synthetic and manipulated media, which applies to misinformation.

CNBC reported that about a dozen accounts were affected by the erroneous blocks.

Kyle Glen, an OSINT researcher whose account was blocked for 12 hours, tweeted: "It's no coincidence that more than 5 twitter accounts covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine were locked at the same time. What are you doing to prevent the abuse of the report system?"

Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of site integrity, tweeted on Wednesday that the affected accounts weren't the subject of mass reporting.

"A small number of human errors as part of our work to proactively address manipulated media resulted in these incorrect enforcements," Roth said. He added, "We do not trigger automated enforcements based on report volume, ever, exactly because of how easily gamed that would be."