Twitter Removes Nearly 6,000 Saudi-Backed Accounts For Platform Manipulation (reuters.com) 28
Twitter announced Friday that has removed nearly 6,000 accounts for being part of a state-backed information operation originating in Saudi Arabia. Reuters reports: In a public blog post, Twitter said it had removed about 5,929 accounts, which targeted discussions about Saudi Arabia, for violating its "platform manipulation policies." It had also published data about these accounts, it added. Twitter said these accounts represented "the core portion of a larger network of more than 88,000 accounts engaged in spammy behavior across a wide range of topics." Twitter said it had suspended all of these accounts. "Primarily, accounts were amplifying messages favorable to Saudi authorities, mainly through inauthentic engagement tactics such as aggressive liking, retweeting and replying," it said.
Aggressive Liking (Score:1)
Reflections of the human race (Score:1)
Re: What about other lobbies? (Score:2)
Do they heavily leverage Twitter? Thats what this discussion is about. You shouldn't try to leverage in your anti-semetic whataboutism.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Guess they must be doing "good" work thats approved by the good censor?
Re: (Score:2)
Are they trying to hide the fact? Because that's what this is about.
Nice. (Score:2)
Re: Nice. (Score:1)
Spammers who are real individual people shouldn't be squelched with account banning. If they spam, measures to throttle spamming should be introduced. That there are a lot of people expressing the same sentiment (that you apparently disagree with) shouldn't lead to widespread bans.
Not removed, suspended (Score:5, Informative)
Reuter's headline is deceptive.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us... [twitter.com]
These accounts represent the core portion of a larger network of more than 88,000 accounts engaged in spammy behaviour across a wide range of topics. We have permanently suspended all of these accounts from the service. In order to protect the privacy of potentially compromised accounts repurposed to engage in platform manipulation, and in response to researcher feedback requesting that we pre-filter unrelated spam, we have not disclosed data for all 88,000 accounts. In the interest of offering meaningful transparency, the dataset we are disclosing includes a representative, random sample of the fake and spammy accounts associated with this broader network.
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The accounts are not removed, they were suspended (and there were 88,000 of them, not 6,000). They'll probably be restored once the House of Saud invests in the bottomless money pit that it Twitter.
Re: if only they removed the Trump-account ... (Score:2)
Fox news is owned by Saudi Arabia. good luck taking them down. Try it and they will send some more national heros to crash some more planes into American skyscrappers.
Re: if only they removed the Trump-account ... (Score:1)
You want opinions that differ from your removed from the discussion. Be honest about your intent.
Re:Twitter is a cesspit of ignorance and bile. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Twitter is a cesspit of ignorance and bile.
I think you misspelled Senate.
Dear Jack Dorsey, ... (Score:4, Funny)
... there's somebody with a bone saw in the lobby wanting to talk to you.
Idiots (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In the U.S., my guess is that the generations that have been raised on TV with commercials every 10 minutes have no powers of concentration. So they need something with blurbs that are easily read and able to respond with small snippets of whatever zephyr is zipping through their heads at that time. They feel they are expressing themselves in blurbettes that have the intellectual depth somewhere short of the thickness of a dime.
Re: Idiots (Score:2)
The problem is that 'Journalists' still take Twitter seriously. It's a platform that regular people aren't nearly as involved with. It's a meme-generating medium that has captured the attention of the mandarins who control the 'News' business. Ordinary people pay it a lot less attention.
Re: Idiots (Score:2)
much easier to find people that agree with this weeks agenda searching twitter than picking up a telephone and working their way through the phone book - or worse asking 1000 plebs on the street until they eventually find one or two willing to say what they want.
Re: Idiots (Score:2)
"heres what some people said" is propaganda 101:how to make people think what you want.
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Twitter allows everyone using it to believe that it's everyone else that's paying attention to what they have to say.
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Meanwhile on Reddit (Score:1)