Alexei Navalny, Russian anti-corruption activist and nationalist politician The man, described by some as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s biggest opponent, died on February 16 in a Siberian penal colony.
The cause of death is unknown, but guess by Western officials place the blame squarely on Putin. This theory is supported by his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, who said in a video statement that he had given up on the drug so authorities could wait for traces of the deadly nerve agent called Novichok to leave his body. He claimed to have kept the body of
Navalnaya made this claim in a video posted to X on Monday, claiming that Putin killed her husband and that she would continue his work.
“I want to live in a free Russia, I want to build a free Russia,” Reuters report The words she said in the video were in Russian.
Navalnaya quickly amassed hundreds of thousands of followers and tens of thousands of messages of sympathy, but her account was temporarily suspended on Tuesday.
Several hours passed before your account was created restored. Meanwhile, X has exploded, with users accusing owner Elon Musk of being sympathetic to President Vladimir Putin, citing recent reports about restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine.
“The platform’s defense mechanisms against defacement and spam erroneously flagged @yulia_navalnaya for violating the rules,” a statement from X’s safety team said. We plan to unsuspend the account and update our defense efforts as soon as we become aware of the error. ”
Although X’s statement did not explicitly say that the decisions regarding Navalnaya’s account were made by an automated system, blaming the suspension on “defense mechanisms” and promising to “update our defenses” may be partially to information researchers, it seemed to imply that decisions about human accounts were made by automated systems. We were not involved in the initial decision to close your account.
They immediately took issue with this statement and questioned whether explanations blaming suspensions on automated decisions, even implicitly, were accurate.
Michael Veale, associate professor of digital rights and regulation at University College London’s School of Law, said: “This is an interesting statement given that Company X has reported that it does not have automated content moderation under the Digital Services Act.” ” he responded in a quoted tweet.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) EU regulations The law went into effect in October 2022 with the aim of combating illegal content, ensuring transparency in advertising, and fighting disinformation. One of the provisions of this law requires platforms to upload moderation decisions to their DSA. transparency database We will provide details such as the basis for the decision, the type of content being moderated, and whether the decision was made by automated means.
according to paper From 2023, researchers at the University of Bremen looked at moderation decisions made within a day of being uploaded to a database and reported that X only used human moderation for its decisions. As such, the platform reported far fewer moderation decisions than other platforms during the days the researchers looked at.
review of database The Daily Dot found that every single moderation decision uploaded by X to its database was tagged Not Automated.
None of X’s 673,828 decisions to date are tagged as fully automated or partially automated.
X’s content moderation reports mention 8,881 fraudulent accounts as keywords, but none of the reports mention “manipulation” or “spam” as mentioned in X’s safety team statement .
“X did not report any automated detections or decisions,” said Daria Dergacheva, one of the study’s authors. daily dot.
However, this document only refers to EU-based content.
Navalnaya currently lives in an “undisclosed location” outside Russia. according to in the report of guardian. She created the X account in February and first posted on the 19th, when she was in Brussels to meet with EU leaders about her husband’s death. 4 days ago she was inside She spoke publicly about her husband’s death at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
“[X] Depending on the situation, you can claim automatic moderation in other regions as well. [on] That’s how they view Navalnaya’s explanation,” Dergacheva said, offering a possible explanation.
“Theoretically, if FBK and Yulia created it in Germany” [though] There should have been no automatic detection or automatic decision making,” Dergacheva continued, referring to Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. Disbanded In Russia in 2021.
Twitter’s security team was unable to answer questions about what type of moderation tools were used to review Navalnaya’s account.
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*First published: February 20, 2024 at 4:01pm CST
Marlon Ettinger
Marlon Ettinger writes about politics, crime, and culture. For tips and ideas please email him at marlonjettinger@gmail.com.