Twitter announced on Tuesday that it will require the removal of tweets posted by government or state-affiliated media account if they contain images or videos that show prisoners of war from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The company also said it would drastically reduce the chances of people seeing posts from Russian government accounts.
In its recent updates to a post detailing how the company is responding to the conflict, Twitter says this decision is meant to ensure its platform is not used to spread content that violates the geneva conventions one of which requires prisoners of war to be protected from acts of violence and against insult and public curiosity. This comes after the government of Ukraine has been criticized for posting images of dead soldiers as well as videos of captured soldiers being interrogated.
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While Twitter will ask government accounts to remove media showing prisoners of war there will be the same expectations for compelling public interest or newsworthy POW content according to a thread by Twitter is head of site integrity yeol Roth. According the post users will see a warning interstitial if a post is allowed to stay up. The company also says that content showing POWS that is shared with abusive intent.
Government sharing media depicting POWS is a controversial subject especially in a conflict where one side is a clear aggressor. As slate points out the videos of prisoners of war posted by the Ukraine government accounts can be viewed as sympathetic they seems to suggest that some Russian soldiers have been lied to by their government and are also suffering because of the invasion.
