Mary McIntyre’s account was locked three months ago after she tweeted a video of a meteor streaking through the night sky over her home in Oxfordshire. She initially received a 12-hour ban after being told the clip contained “intimate” content that had been shared without a participant’s consent. “It was not offensive or pornographic at all,” McIntyre said. “It was just a meteorite.” Her account was unlocked on Thursday after the BBC highlighted her situation and other users tweeted the platform’s support team. McIntyre said that after the initial ban expired, Twitter offered to restore her access if she deleted the tweet and agreed that she had violated its privacy guidelines. She refused, having done nothing in breach of the guidelines, as she was concerned about the implications of her role doing outreach work with children. “It’s unfortunate that the story had to blow up like this to get my account back,” he said. Her account still contains the meteor video, which she assumes was wrongly flagged by Twitter’s automated moderation systems. “I don’t see how a human moderator could have been offended by that, so I guess it was artificial intelligence,” he said. Last year, the owner of a digital photo gallery in Winchester temporarily blocked some of his photos from Facebook because they were said to contain “overtly sexual” content, including a cow standing in a field and an office building. Facebook apologized and reinstated the images, which had been caught by surveillance systems when the gallery owner tried to use them as advertisements. Alex Hern’s weekly dive into how technology is shaping our lives Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. McIntyre said she did not expect access to be restored following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last month, which was followed by thousands of layoffs at the company. About 50% of Twitter’s staff were laid off and the company’s head of trust and security resigned, shortly after tweeting that 15% of trust and security employees at the company had been laid off. Twitter has been contacted for comment.
