Twitter is a platform of 300 million monthly users that has been used in positive ways such as educating people about serious events around the world. In places where information is difficult to authenticate, the site has been a great help for delivering news from people on the ground located within conflict zones about ongoing crises. 

However, the platform has a serious problem when it comes to nefarious actors denying atrocities and attempting to suppress information about ongoing human rights abuses of authoritarian governments, particularly those of Syria and China. 

Currently, the process for handling misinformation is an honour system. People must report each individual tweet or account that is harmful. Not only is this insufficient, but with the proliferation of highly influential spreaders of misinformation, it can be reversed to target accounts attempting to fact-check hateful propaganda. The assessment of reports is not transparent, and consequences are delivered prior to any opportunity for resolution. Recent feature additions to Twitter such as the "Fact-Check notice" are a helpful tool for impeding the spread of harmful misinformation but they have not been applied equally.

As a Syrian myself, I have been viciously attacked for criticism of my own country's regime and my friends and colleagues have had their accounts locked due to mass-reporting ("brigading") by influential pro-Assad profiles.

Uyghur activists documenting China’s human rights abuses have also been targeted for sharing their experiences.

The same issues have been documented in regards to activists reporting on the criminal activities of Lukashenko and Putin. 

Activists documenting the current coup in Myanmar have noted the same problems on Twitter. 

We call on Twitter to enforce the same standards regarding those who convey perverse narratives about well-documented atrocities as they do to COVID-19 and election fraud misinformation. These include but are not limited to the denial of crimes against humanity and governmental abuses of power in countries such as:

• Syria
• China
• Kashmir
• Turkey
• Palestine
• Russia
• Western Sahara
• Myanmar
• Iran
• Belarus 
• Venezuela 
• Cuba

We also call on Twitter to improve the reporting mechanism in the following ways:

- Allow for the investigation process prior to handing down consequences such as a temporary ban.

- Flag users or their tweets as potentially misleading while the investigation takes place against potential tweets that deny atrocities.

- Take action to suspend the account or remove a tweet after they had a chance to appeal the outcome of the investigation rather than before.