Did Elon's Twitter Blacklist Ukrainians? Key Feature Mysteriously Disabled In War-Torn Region

Elon Musk’s Twitter has purportedly disabled the Ukrainian dialing code (+380) from its list of accepted phone numbers.

The move effectively silences users in the war-torn country given the micro-blogging platform’s new rules surrounding Twitter Blue, and blue-check verification status.

What Happened: Paul Massaro, Senior Policy Advisor at U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe took to the social platform Wednesday to share that the +380 Ukrainian dialing code had been totally deleted from Twitter’s database, making it so that Ukrainian users with two-factor authentication cannot access their profiles.

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In accordance with Twitter's new policies governing Twitter Blue and its blue-check verification, a user must enter a working phone number in order to receive blue-check verification status.

Since a key benefit of blue-check verification is that tweets sent as comments "rocket to the top of replies, mentions, and search," Ukrainian users will not be ranked.

Why It Matters: If they aren’t verified, their comments, and mentions will not be ranked next to those users in other countries that have verification.

Searching for Ukrainian twitter accounts may be difficult as well — a peculiar time to blacklist a country that has been dealing with a Russian invasion for ten months.

On Tuesday, the state-owned Ukrainian media outlet UNITED24 reported that adding a Ukrainian cell number to Twitter was no longer available.

On Wednesday, UNITED24 discovered that it had been placed under a shadow ban.

Users claim they cannot discover the media source when they search for the handle on Twitter, despite the fact that it has not been blocked. Moreover, it's possible that the account won't see replies to tweets in its feed.

It is unclear at this time why Twitter removed Ukraine’s dialing code.

What It Could Be: Musk stated on Twitter on Sunday that "the bots are in for a surprise tomorrow."

In the hours that followed, Twitter effectively barred access to hundreds of thousands of accounts, mostly in the Asia-Pacific area, by blocking the traffic of about 30 mobile providers globally.

According to Platformer, Twitter identified mobile operators used by significant spam networks in particular countries and blocked their users from receiving SMS messages from Twitter, affecting users with two-factor authentication.

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