They thought it was an a-steroid.
A UK astronomer has been reinstated on Twitter after allegedly getting banned because her meteor video was mistaken for porn. A Tweet detailing her exile from the Elon Musk-owned platform is currently orbiting online.
“I’m back!!!!!!!!!!” announced Mary McIntyre, an astronomer from Oxfordshire, in the jubilant post. “After 3 months of being blocked due to my Perseid meteor video being flagged as intimate media, I wasn’t able to get my account back unless I admitted to breaking the rule.”
The ludicrous saga occurred in August after the space expert posted an innocuous six-second clip of the Perseid meteor shower.
“#Perseid #fireball I saw last night from #Oxfordshire,” McIntyre wrote in the Tweet on Aug. 13. “It was detected on our NW #meteorcamera. The ionization trail was awesome (I’ll share next!).”
Accompanying footage showed one of the meteors streaking across the night sky.
Shortly after uploading the Tweet, the stargazer was allegedly locked out of Twitter on the basis that her Tweet contained “intimate content without the consent of the participant” — a designation usually reserved for pornographic posts, per the Daily Mail.
McIntyre claimed she was told that she’d only be allowed back on the platform if she deleted the Tweet and acknowledged that she’d broken the rules.
However, the brit refused on the grounds that she hadn’t done anything wrong. “I do a lot of work with school children and Brownies and scouts,” McIntyre told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program. “I don’t really want it on my record that I have been sharing pornographic material when I haven’t.”
Unfortunately, the astronomer’s refusal to admit wrongdoing caused her initial 12-hour ban to be prolonged for months as she tried to appeal her case, the BBC reported.
“I must have gone through the appeals process as many times as I can,” lamented McIntyre of the bureaucratic bottleneck. “We found an online contact form on the help page, I must have contacted them eight times now, and I just get nothing.”
During her social media excommunication, the meteor-lover’s account was visible but she couldn’t access it, causing her to feel “cut off from the astronomy world.”
Thankfully, McIntyre’s account was reinstated — a staggering three months after the initial ban.
This isn’t the first time someone’s harmless Tweet has been flagged as porn of late. Nick Acheson, who tweets “almost exclusively” about nature under the handle @TheMarshTit, claimed his account had been suspended after he Tweeted a post about “pinkfoot geese” earlier this week, the Daily Mail reported.
It’s yet unclear what sparked the spate of social media banishments. However, techsperts claim that it was caused by limitations of the AI moderation tools employed by Twitter and other social media firms.
“AI tools are OK for quick and dirty decisions, but it shows that content moderation at scale is really difficult — both for humans and for the AI tools that are supporting them,” technology commentator Kate Bevan told the BBC. “It’s even worse when there are no humans available to review bad AI decisions. Apart from the unfairness, it means the AI model isn’t getting feedback, so it will never learn to improve.”
They say this phenomenon could be exacerbated by Musk’s mass layoffs following his $44 billion Twitter takeover last month. These mass purges likely put a dent in the branch that battles misinformation.