Thread by @EliotHiggins

In all seriousness, will @TwitterSafety no longer permit statements claiming Syrian chemical weapon attacks were "false flags"? I'd be interested in seeing whose authority they refer to on that topic, because if its the OPCW then a whole lot of people will be censured.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1399863970371039232

There's still a community of people who deny the Syrian government's Sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun, and we've had the OPCW state they were the likely perpetrator of the attack, so will that be what @TwitterSupport uses to make these decisions?

I wouldn't be against that, but keep in mind the OPCW IIT has only laid blame in a handful of chemical attacks in Syria, so the conspiracy theorists could bang on about attacks like Douma that the IIT hasn't reported on if that was the level Twitter required.

But we also have the work of the OHCHR Commission of Inquiry on Syria (@UNCoISyria) who blame the Syrian government for many more chemical attacks in Syria, so would Twitter use that?

And keep in mind this isn't just conspiracy theorists denying chemical weapon attacks the OPCW and UN COI have said Syria was responsible for, but Russian and Syrian government officials and social media media accounts, do they all get banned for denying these attacks happened?

This isn't to say "yay, lets go ban all the tankies", but a serious question of how exactly this policy will be policed, because Syria is just one of many examples of where you have this sort of denialism, we've seen it from a range of communities on Twitter,

Every conflict or major event has a community of denialists who form around it, it's just the nature of social media, but some conflicts and events have a lot more professional analysis done on them than others, and some events might never get an expert eye.

Also, if the UN or some major international body does become the standard they work to then it can take years for official reports to come out on incidents, and frequently this denialism takes place during events.

This seems like an untenable situation if Twitter plans to take this issue of denialism seriously, so do they then look to fact checking organisations? What if government officials or bodies deny these incidents, how will they react to factcheckers trumping their official claims?

Imagine if a Russian government official got banned because Twitter decided to take the word of Bellingcat over them? And if they say certain people can deny war crimes on Twitter, especially government officials, are they really taking the issue seriously?

It'll be valuable to see how Twitter applies this policy, I can't see that they've updated the reporting options, so I'm still unclear how you'd report that behaviour, but I guess we'll all have to watch this one closely.

I'd be genuinely interested in hearing everyone's thoughts on this, as I think it would impact a lot of people and communities many of you "engage" with on a daily basis, and probably would like to see the back of.

(But you don't get to complain about Twitter being boring if they go)