Twitter blocked the account of the ZDF political magazine “Frontal” for several hours on Wednesday. As ZDF tweeted in the morning, the short message service gave the reason that the year of birth stored in the account was wrong. “The investigation into the causes is continuing,” it said later on the ZDF Twitter account. “We can’t understand the supposedly incorrect age classification at the moment.”
Previously, several Twitter users such as ZDF moderator Anja Reschke and the German Association of Journalists (DJV) had suspected a connection with a “Frontal” report broadcast on Tuesday evening, which dealt with the alleged involvement of the international aid organization SOS Children’s Villages in the kidnapping of Ukrainian children to Russia.
At noon, the “Frontal” editorial team tweeted about the reactivated account: “We’re back!” One wonders why Twitter “suddenly considered the program ‘minor'” and asked for an ID for verification, it said. The editors also posted a link to the report on the kidnapped children.
The DJV federal chairman Frank Überall spoke of an arbitrary and unjustifiable interference in the freedom of broadcasting. The political whims of Twitter owner Elon Musk should not determine which journalistic content would be posted or blocked.
According to research by the ZDF political magazine, Ukrainian children are said to have been abducted to facilities of the Russian branch of SOS Children’s Villages. Images obtained by the Frontal editorial team showed Ukrainian children being taken to the Tomilino settlement near Moscow, sources said. There they would apparently be handed over to Russian foster parents.
According to Frontal, the Munich-based aid organization SOS Children’s Villages admitted that they knew of 13 Ukrainian children in their villages in Russia: “SOS Children’s Villages Russia cannot provide any information about how the children came to Russia and how they got there obtained Russian citizenship,” ZDF quoted from the statement.