As lawyers begin their seventh week of strike against the pension reform, their union had the unpleasant surprise to see its Twitter account, particularly active in the mobilization and followed by nearly 8000 people, suspended Tuesday morning. The indignant reactions were not long in coming.
A feeling reinforced by the lack of explanation from the social network, which put the account online a few hours later. This error would however be easily explained. This weekend, the Syndicate of Lawyers' Twitter account sent dozens of almost identical messages to MPs urging them to vote against the pension reform.
This behavior, typical of automatic propaganda accounts, has probably been detected as such by social network moderation algorithms. An observation shared by the union in the press release it published.
Contacted, Twitter did not give an explanation for this suspension. But its general conditions of use are rather clear. " We do not allow spam or any other type of manipulation of the platform, " says the social network. No more than " the publication, repeatedly, of identical or almost identical Tweets ". It is therefore probable that the messages published this weekend by the lawyers' union were perceived as “ inauthentic ” by the moderating robots of Twitter.
Following this, several lawyers worried about the consequences on democracy of such a suspension and took the opportunity to flay the Avia law against cyberhaine, which would further constrain social networks to moderate the content that is shared there.
A concern shared by MEP Laetitia Avia herself, who however drew a radically different conclusion from it.
This is not the first time that Twitter has suspended legitimate accounts due to malfunctions in its moderation tools. In late 2019, dozens of Cuban official media accounts were suspended, prompting accusations of attacks on freedom of expression. There too, Twitter had remained discreet on the reasons which had led to such a decision, being satisfied to evoke its rules of use.