Twitter Marks Clean Sites As Harmful, Breaks Links

starglider29a writes "Yesterday, a website I maintain that has a Twitter presence encountered an 'unsafe' warning when clicking on the tweets. 'This link has been flagged as potentially harmful.' After scanning the site and its database, then checking with Google and third-party site scanners, I found no evidence of harm. At noon, The Atlantic posted an article which describes the same issue with the Philadelphia City Paper. 'Perhaps most frustrating of all is that Twitter has not been particularly responsive to the paper's plight.' If the warnings are incorrect, how does Twitter justify this libel?"

Probably the content

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the years I've noticed a trend with sites and services that offer "safe" lists. Websense, for example, filter software that many companies and governments use, has a tendancy to flag or block sites, not because they are unsafe, but instead, based on people reporting the site, for their own reasons.

A site talking about the situation in Gaza, for example, was flagged through websense and blocked. When I checked from home, the site was safe, no scripts, no tracking, and of course, violated no rules. But, because it wasn't as critical of Gaza (read racist) a group using "megaphone" (google it) had flagged the site with repeated complaints and websense blocked it. I contacted them and had it unblocked.

I've seen various sites flagged through google as "unsafe" that are infact completely safe. It's just a matter of a group of people, with too much time, not agreeing with the content of the site. Usually opinion pieces.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if this was the case here as well. Youtube is horrible for it, I had songs I wrote and recorded flagged various times, because some people from some sites saw that I had a youtube channel and decided to go after me, every video.

Hash Collision?

[stewsters]

I believe these [google.com] things use lists of hashes of the domains to increase the speed of lookup. It's possible that you have a hash collision with a malware site. They are super rare, but possible. Not sure what you can do about that. It's also possible that there is something that reads as an infected file hosted on your site. A pdf or something that looks like a virus.

Libel?

[93 Escort Wagon]

It's not enough to claim the statements are wrong - by claiming libel, the submitter is stating that Twitter knows the statements are wrong and is deliberately making them anyway. That seems a rather high bar to clear.

Maybe Twitter thinks the sites are dead. After all, you can't libel the dead...

Grain of truth

[jdavidb]

If the warnings are incorrect, how does Twitter justify this libel?

Probably the same way you justify your hyperbole: with the basic fact that people are entitled to their own opinions, even if others disagree. Using big dramatic legal sounding words to try to bludgeon others over their opinions is actually harmful to society, in my opinion.