The social media platform X temporarily suspended on Tuesday an account created by Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Aleksei A. Navalny, and then restored it, saying it had been mistakenly flagged by its automated security protocols.
Ms. Navalnaya opened the account on Monday to announce that she would continue her husband’s work advocating for a free, peaceful and democratic Russia in the wake of her husband’s death in a remote Arctic prison. More than 90,000 users followed the account in its first 24 hours.
But on Tuesday, the account and its activity suddenly disappeared, replaced by the words “Account suspended” and a note that X — the social media company formerly known as Twitter — “suspends accounts which violate the X Rules.”
“Our platform’s defense mechanism against manipulation and spam mistakenly flagged @yulia_navalnaya as violating our rules,” X’s safety team wrote on the platform later on Tuesday. “We unsuspended the account as soon as we became aware of the error, and will be updating the defense.”
Earlier in the day, Ms. Navalnaya wrote on the social network Telegram that “Twitter has imposed restrictions on my account, which I opened yesterday.”
“According to the Shadowban Test service, my tweets are not shown in searches, and if you enter my name in the search bar, my page is not recommended among recommendations,” she wrote.
After the account was reinstated, tens of thousands of new followers were being added.
The brief suspension came shortly after Mr. Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, posted a video on YouTube addressed to President Vladimir V. Putin in which she demanded the release of her son’s body.
“I ask you, Vladimir Putin, let me finally see my son,” Ms. Navalnaya, 69, said while standing in front of the Arctic penal colony where Mr. Navalny was pronounced dead on Friday.
“For a fifth day now, I have not been able to see him, they do not release his body to me, they do not even tell me where it is,” she said. “I demand that Aleksei’s body be released immediately so that I can bury him in a humane way.”
Behind her, a fence topped with a coil of concertina wire marked the perimeter of the prison. The video also appears on Yulia Navalnaya’s restored X account.
On Monday, a spokeswoman for Navalny’s organization said investigators told Ms. Navalnaya that Mr. Navalny’s body would not be released for at least two more weeks.
On Tuesday, the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs announced it had placed Mr. Navalny’s brother Oleg on a wanted list. Russia’s state-owned news agency TASS, citing law enforcement agencies, said that a new criminal case has been opened against Oleg Navalny, without specifying which law or laws he has been accused of violating. However, the independent outlet Mediazona wrote on X that Oleg Navalny has been in the wanted database since 2022.
Oleg Navalny was sentenced to three and a half years in prison in 2014 on charges of fraud. Kremlin critics have long said the charges against him were manufactured with the intention of silencing his brother.
Oleg Navalny is believed to be living in exile outside Russia.
Source Agencies
