If you’ve been following the Ukraine crisis at a distance, you may not have realised but Twitter is one of the key battlespaces right now. For the past weeks or

If you’ve been following the Ukraine crisis at a distance, you may not have realised but Twitter is one of the key battlespaces right now. For the past weeks organisations like Bellingcat and hundreds of individual researchers have been tracking Russian force movements, geolocating videos of convoys, identifying equipment and correlating this with reports from all over social media. These people have put together tweet threads thousands of tweets long, which is an invaluable tool for transparency and radically reduces deniability of those operations, by an aggressor who has claimed not to be preparing an invasion at all. Such open source intelligence is relied upon by international aid organisations, media, even the UN. Presently they are engaged in a whack-a-mole of false flag operations created in an fumbling attempt to manufacture a pretext to begin a large scale invasion of Ukraine. This has included shelling separatists’ own infrastructure to blame Ukraine; cutting together training videos with explosion audio from somewhere in Finland; recording fake helmet cam footage of fake cross border raids; and now posing corpses who have clear signs of having been autopsied already in burning vehicles and claiming it was Ukraine setting up IEDs. https://twitter.com/eliothiggins/status/1496418900107579396?s=21 https://twitter.com/eliothiggins/status/1496418900107579396?... Now, they have most likely provoked a mass-reporting campaign by Russians, and Twitter has obliged, generally with 12 hour suspensions or account lockouts. The researchers are given notifications with the “Reason:” field blank https://twitter.com/oalexanderdk/status/1496452673008279552 https://twitter.com/oalexanderdk/status/1496452673008279552 . It seems as though something has tripped an automated system, and these people cannot for the life of them get through to a human. If you or anyone you know works at Twitter, these researchers need your help. 12 hour suspensions may seem bearable to you, but in this conflict, that is enough time for everything to go haywire while the observers are locked away. Some more links: https://twitter.com/osinttechnical/status/1496409672571625478?s=21 https://twitter.com/osinttechnical/status/149640967257162547... https://twitter.com/intelcrab/status/1496521974138519556?s=21 https://twitter.com/intelcrab/status/1496521974138519556?s=2... https://twitter.com/walterlekh/status/1496517291349057537?s=21 https://twitter.com/walterlekh/status/1496517291349057537?s=... An apparent leader of mass-reporting: https://twitter.com/bvasylchenko/status/1496536608778108928?s=21 https://twitter.com/bvasylchenko/status/1496536608778108928?...