Twitter blames bug for banning dozens of accounts

Social media giants, Twitter is blaming a bug for accidentally banning a bunch of accounts by accident.

In the past 24 hours, the company has “banned” over a dozen accounts by accidentally marking them as “withheld” from the whole world.

According to Buzzfeed News, over 21 accounts were affected. Instead of being suspended or outright banned, their accounts were marked as “withheld: worldwide.” This is part of Twitter’s “country withheld” program, where certain accounts are barred from being viewed in certain countries, usually because it violates the country’s laws of expression. Being “withheld worldwide” would, however, effectively ban your tweets from being seen by everyone.

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Buzzfeed News notes that one of the users that was hit with the “withheld worldwide” ban had been critical of J.K. Rowling. But according to Twitter, it was all a mistake. According to a Twitter spokesperson: “We have identified a bug that incorrectly impacted certain accounts. We have identified a fix, are working to resolve the issue, and anticipate it will be fully resolved shortly.”

Be that as it may, this isn’t good news for a company already beleaguered with problems that include Russian trolls, broken searches and, unfortunately, hate speech.

 

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