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Twitter Mistakenly Blocks SCOTUSBlog on Day of Abortion Decision

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Twitter locked out the operators of the popular Supreme Court online chronicler SCOTUSBlog on Monday, on the same day the court struck down Texas anti-abortion restrictions, probably because it mistakenly thought the account had gotten hacked.

When they got kicked out of their own account, the blog was responding to readers on Twitter on Monday afternoon, an annual tongue-in-cheek tradition they call "running of the trolls," when they respond to tweeps who think SCOTUSBlog is the official Twitter account of the Supreme Court of the United States.

"We've done this for several Terms without incident," SCOTUSBlog publisher Tom Goldstein wrote in a blog post on Monday evening. "But this Term, Twitter—probably through some automated system—decided that our account had been hacked. So it kicked us out of our account—thinking we were the hackers—and then blocked all the tweets."

Check ur attitude. We haven't ended capital punishment yet. MT SCOTUSblogJune 27, 2016

It's unclear why Twitter thought SCOTUSBlog had been hacked. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Goldstein declined to comment while his team was trying to get the issue fixed, and while he was waiting to "have the full context."

Twitter even deleted some of the tweets, but as I was writing this article, several tweets from the last few hours came back on SCOTUSBlog's account.