How Musk’s Twitter is Jeopardizing War Crimes Investigations

Raquel Vazquez Llorente is the Head of Law and Policy — Technology Threats and Opportunities at WITNESS. Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, the platform has undergone numerous policy changes. Once one of the most accessible platforms for external researchers seeking data to investigate human rights abuses, war crimes, and other international law violations, Twitter’s erratic policymaking under Musk may now hamper investigations into international crimes. Crucially, the new policy decisions may also have serious unintended consequences for communities often targeted by governments, such as activists, journalists, and human rights defenders reporting from crises and armed conflicts.  On July 1, in a policy spat spanning five hours over Twitter, Musk imposed restrictions on usage to limit data scraping to train AI models like ChatGPT. The day before, Twitter blocked unregistered users from freely navigating the site, forcing people to create an account–a move Facebook took several years ago. On March 29, after many delays and uncertainties, the company announced new pricing tiers for access to its API, an application that allows software developers to engage with and use Twitter’s data directly. Despite global demands from a wide array of actors, including the organization I work for, WITNESS, and at least 113 others, the company effectively shut down free access to data via their API. And last December, Twitter declared that it would remove any tweets or accounts that share someone’s live location, including travel updates, without the permission of the person concerned. Musk had previously given assurances that…How Musk’s Twitter is Jeopardizing War Crimes Investigations