INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightGetty Images Cyrillic is an ancient script dating back more than 1,000 years with the earliest form of the alphabet emerging
in Bulgaria in the 9th Century
But some Bulgarians have found their Twitter accounts suspended and tweets hidden because they are thought to be the work of Russian bots,
as Russian also uses the Cyrillic alphabet.Bulgarian blogger Ilia Temelkov tweeted, in Cyrillic: "Hey Twitter, the Cyrillic alphabet is used
by 12 countries in addition to Russia
Can you get serious Can you, Twitter" Temelkov points out he is not a bot and asked Twitter not to shadow ban him (meaning to hide his
Similarly, @sassyqueso said: "To think that the Bulgarian and the Russian language are the same," alongside a hashtag which translates as
"How to be dumb."Vlad Savov, a journalist who covered the confusion for American technology news site The Verge also found people who had
Why could this be happeningSpeaking at a United States Senate Committee inquiry into extremist content and Russian disinformation online,
Twitter's acting general counsel Sean Edgett shed some light on why this might be happening
He said in October 2017 that Twitter's tools "do not attempt to differentiate between 'good' and 'bad' automation," when looking for
"They rely on objective, measurable signals, such as the timing of tweets and engagements to classify a given action as automated."What can
qualify as a Russian-linked Twitter account Created in RussiaRegistered with a Russian phone carrier or email addressUser's display name
contains Cyrillic charactersTweets are frequently in the Russian languageLogged in to Twitter via a Russian IP address even once"We
considered an account to be Russian-linked if it had even one of the relevant criteria," said Mr Edgett.So having a display name containing
Cyrillic characters or tweeting in Russian could lead Twitter's algorithms to think the account was possibly automated
However, the TheIndianSubcontinent has not seen any such problems from Ukraine or Belarus, two other countries which use Cyrillic.Twitter
has said it is "looking into this issue and will take any needed steps to resolve it, while continuing to take actions to enforce our terms
of service and combat malicious networks of spam and automation".Twitter was in the news back in February for attempting to clamp down on
automated social media accounts giving prominence to certain tweets
Users found themselves locked out of their accounts until they verified with their phone number that they were real
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