Twitter accuses AI of freezing government-critical accounts

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When Twitter froze the accounts of an outspoken government critic and a satirical film that portrayed Prime Minister Yoshihide Sugas’ politics with black humor, netizens suspected it was political censorship.

But Twitter Japan attributes the incidents to a misguided account reported by artificial intelligence.

One of the accounts in question was that of Isoko Mochizuki, a reporter for the Tokyo Shimbun.

She said she couldn’t log into her account around 1 a.m. on July 11, preventing her from tweeting or scrolling through other users’ posts.

She reported the difficulty to Twitter.

Mochizuki has approximately 240,000 subscribers. Some of them noticed it five hours later and started tweeting Lift Freeze Isoko Mochizukis Account with an accompanying hashtag.

Mochizuki was able to come back to his account around 10 a.m. that day.

Twitter Japan said its account was closed because the company’s artificial intelligence mistakenly believed it had been hijacked by someone or was engaged in activities that violated its terms of service.

In an interview with The Asahi Shimbun, Natsuko Nishimura, communications manager at Twitter Japan, denied that there were political motives behind the account lockdown.

It is impossible to freeze an account for any political reason and to suspect (the politics) is behind the freeze is totally wrong, she said. His account may have been frozen not because of his posts, but because of the activities of a third party.

Twitter Japan said a support team is using AI for 24-hour surveillance to quickly tackle spam tweets and other rule-breaking activity.

Mochizuki has become a household name after showering Suga with tough questions at press conferences while he was Chief Cabinet Secretary. She appeared in the 2019 film i-Documentary of the Journalist.

The official Twitter account for the satirical film Pancake o dokumi suru (Taste a pancake to make sure it’s not toxic) was also temporarily frozen in June.

The distributor, Star Sands Inc., reached out to Twitter Japan about the account freeze shortly after it happened on the morning of June 24. The freeze was lifted the next day.

Star Sands said he received an email from Twitter Japan on June 26 explaining that his AI could have marked the account as spam.

The film, produced in a variety show format, examines Sugas’ political positions from various angles, such as how he responds to questions from the Diet. It is due out on July 30. Pancakes are one of Sugas’ favorite foods.

In both cases, Twitter Japan blamed its AI for mistakenly reporting the accounts.

Nishimura said AI inevitably ends up catching innocent accounts in its net, as the company prioritizes speed in its fight against the circulation of inappropriate content and the illicit use of accounts.

We strive to fully explain to our users why such an incident has occurred, she said.

(This article was written by Yasukazu Akada and Seiko Sadakuni.)

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