Our Future on Twitter

We've been watching the situation on Twitter unfold over the last month and I am not interested in a debate on Elon Musk's acquisition and the merits or lack there of. This is a matter of practicality.

Yesterday, Twitter changed their Terms of Service about geolocation, journalism, reporting, and sharing information. There has been extensive conversations in the OSINT community and among journalists on what this means and where are the boundaries.

Some points of clarity were attempted to be given, stating that newsworthy events, public events, and stories widely reported aren't impacted and geolocation of something 24 hours after it happened is acceptable.

The question raised is what about a video that is shared on a private Telegram channel that gets circulated showing fighting, a war crime, an attack, and it is geolocated in near real time (less than 24 hours). In our business, less than 24 hours is an eternity. Think about during the Kharkiv counteroffensive or Russia's withdrawal from Kherson how much happened in 24 hours, and how useless social intelligence that is 24 hours old is.

We are already seeing a lot less information on Twitter since the Musk acquisition, which is why you're seeing a lot more data coming from Telegram. We have also stopped pulling videos from Telegram to post them to Twitter because of the current environment.

Earlier today ABSExchange was suspended by Twitter for violating Terms of Service. ABSExchange has been an invaluable tool for tracking NATO aircraft and a resource we have used in the early months of the war to monitor the allied airlift and flight activity. ABSExchange provides flight tracking to any aircraft, and was in no way similar to the ElonJet account. This is a chilling message about real-time and near real-time OSINT data sharing. 

For me personally, this was the final straw. We have also learned that our Twitter account, along with many OSINT accounts and Defmon3 are shadow banned while Russian OSINT and disinformation sites like Russians with Attitude and Zoka are not.

Take all the time you need.

Effective tomorrow, we will be posting a lot less on Twitter, but we are not leaving. It will be limited to retweets of others content and "podcast is up" and promotion. That will be it. We cannot invest time in a channel where our access is predicated upon the mood of its billionaire owner.

The truth matters - but we can't invest in a platform actively trying to suppress the truth. The impact this could have in other parts of the world like the ongoing Iranian civil unrest, China COVID lockdowns, Brazilian protests, Kosovo-Serbia, are unacceptable. If information can be shared either after "official sources" or 24 hours after the fact, this dismantles the value proposition of Twitter as a real-time news gather source.

We will not participate in the suppression of public information.

Thank you for your understanding.

The truth matters.