Twitter Bans Accounts
August 22, 2018
i read “Facebook and Twitter Ban over 900 Accounts in Bid to Tackle Fake News.” Twitter was founded about 12 years ago. The company found itself in the midst of the 2016 election messaging flap. The article reports:
Facebook said it had identified and banned 652 accounts, groups and pages which were linked to Iran and to Russia for “co-ordinated inauthentic behavior”, including the sharing of political material.
One of the interesting items of information which surfaced when my team was doing the research for CyberOSINT and the Dark Web Notebook, both monographs designed for law enforcement and intelligence professionals, was the ease with which Twitter accounts can be obtained.
For a program we developed for a conference organizer in Washington, DC, in 2015, we illustrated Twitter messages with links to information designed to attract young men and women to movements which advocated some activities which broke US laws.
The challenge had in 2015 several dimensions. Let me run down the ones the other speakers and I mentioned; for example:
- The ease with which an account could be created
- The ease with which multiple accounts could be created
- The ease with which messages could be generated with suitable index terms
- The ease with which messages could be disseminated across multiple accounts via scripts
- The lack of filtering to block weaponized content.
Back to the present.
Banning an account addresses one of these challenges.
The notion of low friction content dissemination, unrestricted indexing, and the ability to create accounts is one to ponder.
Killing an account or a group of accounts may not have the desired effect.
Compared to other social networks, Twitter has a strong following in certain socio economic sectors. That in itself adds a bit of spice to the sauce.
Stephen E Arnold, August 22, 2018
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