Ana Bejarano. Account restriction without clear reason

On November 14, 2021, Colombian lawyer Ana Bejarano, a columnist for the Los Danieles portal, received a Twitter message asking her to verify her cell phone number to access her account. At the time she was in a live broadcast on other platforms and was not trying to log in to Twitter.

According to Bejarano, he received the Twitter message a few minutes after he read a live column criticizing Defense Minister Diego Molano. Additionally, he was wearing a T-shirt with the phrase "take your rosaries out of our ovaries", alluding to the campaign in favor of the decriminalization of abortion in Colombia.

In the request for her to confirm her phone number, Twitter informed Bejarano that she would receive a text message to verify that it was indeed the account holder who was using the account. But the message never arrived and the account was temporarily restricted by Twitter.

Twitter's measure triggered a wave of messages and protests with the hashtag #TodosConAnaBejarano. Several voices -among journalists, politicians and organizations-accused the platform of censorship. "A T-shirt with a feminist slogan from the 70s. People who can't stand that someone outside their faith uses the word 'rosary'. The rules of a platform that, in order to protect, they silence," Bejarano wrote a day after the fact, when she finally regained access to her account thanks to a direct contact with Twitter representatives.

Both Bejarano and those who supported the protest at the time linked Twitter's decision to the message she was displaying related to the decriminalization of abortion. However, it is not clear that this was the reason - as even the columnist herself later stated. According to Twitter's rules, this type of account restrictions may be due to the fact that the platform detected "suspicious behavior" where it concluded that the account was "compromised". 

It is possible, then, that in an attempt to silence Bejarano a third party tried to log into his account until the restriction was triggered. It is also possible that several tweets issued from the account were misinterpreted by the platform as spam. In any case, as the columnist later explained, Twitter told her that it was not possible to determine the reason.