News accounts shut down Twitter after posting video from SpaceX rocket launch. Twitter flagged at least one video as intimate media without anyone’s explicit consent. Elon Musk said that image recognition needs some work and shared a picture of a hot dog.
Twitter’s image recognition mistook a video of a SpaceX rocket flight for revenge porn, shut down news accounts covering the launch, and Elon Musk shared a hot dog picture in response. SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk, launched 114 small satellites into orbit on Tuesday.
As they usually do, a handful of news sites and YouTube channels diligently tracked the launch, from the preparations an hour before launch, to the Falcon 9 rocket booster coming back to Earth, to the deployment of the satellites in orbit.
One of those news sites, Spaceflight Now, was suddenly locked out of its Twitter account after posting a video of a rocket booster landing. Twitter deemed the tweet a violation of our rules against the unauthorized posting or sharing of privately created/distributed intimate media “without anyone’s explicit consent,” according to a screenshot reviewed by Insider.
The website’s editor Stephen Clark told Insider that the offending tweet was posted and the account was unlocked just 24 hours later. Twitter and SpaceX did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment. But Elon Musk responded to a colleague of Michael Baylor, who runs rocket-launch livestreams for the website NASASpaceflight.
Chris Bergin, the website’s managing editor, said on Twitter that Baylor’s account had also been suspended after he shared photos of the rocket. Elon Musk tweeted back “Looks like our image recognition needs some work!” He included an auxiliary scene of a hot dog – yes, labeled as a hot dog – in a hot dog carton with a shoe, labeled as “not a hot dog”.
Since Musk took ownership of Twitter in October, the company has been shaken by regulatory changes and layoffs. In December, Twitter abruptly suspended the accounts of several prominent journalists who were covering Elon Musk and his acquisition of the company.
Elon Musk said this was because they “document” their location “in real time” by sharing links to publicly available information about the location of their private jets. The next day, he announced the reinstatement of the accounts, citing the results of a Twitter poll where he asked people to vote on whether the accounts should be reinstated.
Original Content: Yahoo News & Bussiness Insider