Why Did These Scholars Suddenly Find Their Twitter Accounts Suspended?

Updated (10/1/2018, 11:36 a.m.) with a response from Twitter.

It was Saturday morning, and Kevin Gannon was drinking coffee, watching some pregame college football, and posting a series of tweets about the only time a Supreme Court justice had been impeached. He said it felt timely given the Senate hearings this week and Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault against the Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Gannon, a professor of history at Grand View University, in Des Moines, went to refill his coffee. When he returned, he found his Twitter account, with more than 40,000 followers, had been suspended. He told The Chronicle he’d received a message that his account had been frozen in connection to breaking some of the social-networking service’s rules, though it wasn’t clear what he had done wrong.

He initially thought he might have been the target of an organized social-media campaign with the goal of suspending his account. Gannon is an active personality on Twitter, and he said he had been the subject of online harassment before, though he had never been reported or suspended, he said.

It wasn’t until later in the day that Gannon realized he was part of a larger group of academics who had been suspended. It wasn’t clear why their accounts had been temporarily taken down. Those suspended included Eleanor Parker, a lecturer in medieval English literature at the University of Oxford who tweets under the handle @ClerkofOxford, and Carl Robert Keyes, an associate professor of early American history at Assumption College, who directs @SlaveAdverts250.

Social-media accounts can be an invaluable tool for scholars trying to reach the public. For their accounts to be suspended without warning or reason is alarming, and may even be censorship of academic ideas.

Two theories emerged following the suspensions. Some suspected that a group of online trolls had organized a campaign to report accounts for violating Twitter’s terms of service and thereby get Twitter to suspend them. Another theory suggests a new Twitter policy, meant to curb discrimination, might have led to the suspended accounts. Gannon initially thought someone had targeted his account, but he has since changed his mind.

“I think we need to realize that this is the reality of our society,” Gannon said. “Algorithms have a lot of power, and the people writing those algorithms, or the companies producing them, thus have a lot of power too.”

Twitter didn’t immediately return a journalist’s request for comment. Gannon appealed his suspension, and later that day his account was reactivated, he said. On Monday a spokesman wrote to The Chronicle by email that the accounts had been suspended in error by the company’s anti-spam technology, and that the accounts had been reinstated. He further said the policy on discriminatory content had not gone live yet, and that the company was still taking feedback as to how to put it in place.

Chris Peterson, an admissions officer, instructor, and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, appeared to be the first to offer the theory about an overaggressive algorithm.

His account, with about 1,700 followers, was also suspended on Saturday morning. It happened, he wrote in a blog post, after he published a message about women’s representation in the STEM fields throughout history.

Peterson, who referred The Chronicle to his blog when asked for comment, wrote that he suspected he was the casualty of a Twitter policy designed to curb “dehumanizing speech.”

The new policy, according to an announcement from the company, aims to bar content that “dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.”

So if someone were to type “all minorities are worthless,” that message could be grounds for suspension under the new policy.

Peterson said he supports Twitter’s efforts to curb harassment. The site has long been criticized for failing to do enough to prevent abuse, especially toward women and minorities.

“However, I also believe that the implementation of these policies and processes can’t be this dumb,” he wrote in the blog post. “I get that this is a really, really hard social and technical problem to solve. But any system that (apparently) flags feminist academic research about the social construction of scientific privilege as being abusive of women as a class is just not ready for production.”

Keyes told The Chronicle he started the account, Slavery Adverts 250, about two years ago as part of a class project. Every day the account tweets a picture of an old newspaper advertisement for the sale of slaves.

Before its suspension, the account had about 2,650 followers. Keyes said he had encountered a troll here or there, but never anything noteworthy. That’s part of why he was surprised when he couldn’t schedule the day’s tweets on Saturday morning. Initially, he thought he was having a problem with the software he uses to program the tweets, so he logged out of his account, but when he tried to get back in, he found he had been blocked.

Confused, he posted a tweet on his personal account about the suspension.

Almost immediately, he said, his colleagues started sharing his message. The account was restored later on Saturday, but Keyes said he appreciated the ability of several historians to come together to quickly to solve the problem.

Though initially troubling, Keyes said, the suspension could be viewed as a positive development. Interest in the account has surged; Keyes said it had gained roughly 900 new followers since Saturday. The suspension and subsequent outcry also occurred right before Keyes was set to have students in his “Slavery and Freedom in Early America” course take over the account. He said allowing them to run the account gives them a chance to do work that is seen by not just him but a wider audience.

“When the class reconvenes this week,” Keyes said. “I will be showing them many of the tweets that were going out to demonstrate, ‘Look, here is the historical community rallying around this project.’”

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.