I wouldn't consider it humiliating. And there's a dimension this doesn't talk about: false positives. Twitter has to make an actual decision to ban an account. When they get this wrong, they have unhappy users and I'm sure articles would appear here about the terrible work they are doing. These researchers pay none of those costs about false positives. Perhaps they have a 7% false positive rate and consider that pretty good. That amounts to about 12,000 legitimate users banned.

Some of Twitter's users are more equal than others when it comes to bans. I don't think they are concerned about blowback from false positives from spam accounts.

e.g.

"Learn to code" was tweeted at me by a sketchy account. I reported it as abusive behavior as part of targeted harassment. Twitter suspended the account within 20 minutes.

Journalists if they tweet "learn to code" at you don't stay silent, take a moment to report it. https://t.co/RXgqqV2ptw

— Ben Popken (@bpopken) February 1, 2019

I wouldn't consider that a typical example given that the whole "learn to code" thing was a targeted harassment campaign. Not difficult to imagine that in that timeframe Twitter had prioritised investigating and banning users who were participating in it.

They didn't extend such protections to schoolchild Nick Sandmann

"#MAGAkids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper"

Probably because there was no coordinated harassment campaign, and he isn't even on Twitter. But sure, keep up the false equivalence.

Who was co-ordinating the tweeting of "Learn to code" at Ben Popken?

Perhaps I can put it another way

"I don’t believe that we can afford to take a neutral stance anymore. I don’t believe that we should optimize for neutrality." - Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Feb 5 2019

4chan. I mean, the threads are all public, it seems exceptionally stupid to claim it wasn't happening.

What would you call this highly publicised and still present Tweet from CNN presenter, Kathy Griffin, I wonder [1]

> Name these kids. I want NAMES. Shame them. If you think these fuckers wouldn’t dox you in a heartbeat, think again.

[1] https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1086927762634399744

I would call it a single abusive tweet. Not a coordinated campaign, not specifically targeted at any Twitter user.

This isn't complex.

Suggesting people tweet "learn to code" at journalists wasn't specifically targeting Ben Popken

And he got 1 response.

Not very effective.

It could also be that accounts that take part in harassment/harassment adjacent behavior may already have a few strikes against them for similar things.

Of course they don't want to kill the spam! Then they'd have to admit a huge fraction of their user accounts are fake.

For all the attention it gets, Twitter is a niche product with many fewer real human users than Instagram or even Snapchat.

Bingo. Fake accounts and bots Make Number Go Up And To The Right, so why on earth would they want to stop them?

Yep. They told their investors tall tales about engagement and growth, and would have to back track considerably if they were honest about the amount of bots on their service.

Twitter has a symbiotic relationship with its spammers: It needs those accounts to drive the metrics their advertisers and shareholders crave.

No it doesn't. Spam doesn't necessarily generate revenue traffic, and it can drive actual consumers off the platform.

This is the same issue as the naive attempts at driving web page hits during the early web. "Look at how many pages people are looking at!"

Then people realized that people were going from page to page because they couldn't find their damned answer anywhere.

And so now more sophisticated metrics are used: time on page. Customer sat metrics — were people actually happy using your website?

While total weekly/monthly active user counts are important what is also important is churn — are people abandoning the platform because of spam, trolls, etc.

Who cares if you create a million fake accounts if you lose a half-million real human users?

I don’t doubt that it’s bad in the worst possible scenario: where spam accounts are highly visible to real users and cause them to disengage.

But in practice what we’ve seen on Twitter are accounts that are largely silo’d off from users, who act to “signal boost” certain tweets and hashtags. Most users never even see these accounts, and will never interact with them directly: but they will see content on their timelines boosted from spammers.

You are grossly overestimating the technological competency of the average Wall Street analyst and retail investor.

Twitter's existing spam filter also evidently has a lot of false positives. I created an account many years ago and used it pretty much just to browse around Twitter, follow people, etc., without posting anything. I dropped off for a couple years and when I came back my location had been changed to Russia (???) and the account was suspended. I saw no evidence that the account had been hacked or anything - there was no activity that I wasn't responsible for.

My appeal was denied without explanation. I can only assume I was wrapped up in some anti-spam measure.

EDIT: To address responses to this, I think it's extremely unlikely the account was hacked. To be clear, there was no account activity of any kind other than the location change. The password was long, complex, and one I did not use anywhere else.

How is having your location set to Russia not evidence of a hack?

Yeah, that's a pretty strong signal that your account got used for some nefarious shit.

There was literally no account activity other than this. What 'nefarious shit' could it have been used for, given there were no tweets, likes, retweets, follows, DMs, or anything of that nature?

EDIT: I should also add that I have a very strong password which is not reused anywhere, so I doubt very much someone guessed the password.

It began creating a history for that account based out of Russia. Which would be useful in the future should somebody in--oh, I don't know, Russia--wanted to use that account for nefarious shit.

So, at some point, someone guessed a complex password I used nowhere else, logged into my Twitter account with it, changed the location, and then did....nothing, because they wanted to one day use the account for something. And Twitter somehow figured all this out, determined the account would one day be used for nefarious ends, and suspended the account because...the location changed? Why? Even if the account was hacked (which I see no evidence for), your contention is that what, Twitter suspended my account for logging in from a new IP, but not until after a successful login and profile change?

I'm sorry, it seems a whole lot more likely Twitter used some heuristic to assume the account was a bot, set the location as a marker, and suspended it.

Twitter doesn't need some kind of stupid hack of setting a visibile-to-you field to flag an account. Your account got hacked. This doesn't necessary mean they guessed the password, there are other ways to take over a well aged but apparently abandoned account.

Yeah, and the bots don't need to set the location to Russia either. In fact, doing so would pretty transparently work against the alleged goals of Russian bot activity on Twitter - if you self-identify as Russian, then you're not posing as an American. I would assume Twitter has separate heuristics for different types of "bots" and flagged it to help make it "clear" to other users that my account was actually a "Russian bot." I don't know.

But again, I don't see the point in taking over an account (please name these other ways of taking one over) and then doing absolutely nothing with it except changing the location. If I'm going to take over aged accounts, why wouldn't I do something with it? How did Twitter identify that the account was hacked, then? Why did they deny my appeal? Why didn't they just ask me to change my password?

Russian propaganda doesn't exclusively target the US. They also target their own citizens. Plus, we don't know that whomever took over your account was Russian, just that they were prepping it for activity in Russia. After an account is taken over they don't immediately start spamming and get themselves banned. They need to gather thousands of accounts before they launch attacks so the anti-spam bots don't shut them down. You can't effectively multiply a message with just a handful of accounts.

Of course at some point the guy who hacked your account fucked it up and blew a bunch of his accounts. At this point Twitter thinks you're just a bot account and doesn't care what you have to say.

Most common other ways to take over an account involve calling tech support and telling them you lost the password and the email account.

For what it's worth, after having this discussion, I logged back into the account. Going to "Apps and devices" shows nothing out of the ordinary.

My country has been reset again to Russia. I had fixed it when it happened the first time.

Yeah, I'm sorry, there's no way it's not Twitter doing this. I'm not sure why so many people here are dead set on the "it must be secret hackers" explanation.

I'm also pretty sure there's not 1-800 Twitter line to call to reset your password, and if Twitter support is giving random people from random emails account access, Twitter has a much bigger problem.

How do you know that content wasn't deleted when your account got suspended?

What type of content were you posting prior to not using the account?

I did not post any content. The only thing I ever did was follow people, mostly writers and friends.

I assumed Twitter did it. Why would someone log into my account and then do absolutely nothing other than set the location?

why would twitter do that?

They needed to show some success fighting the "russian bots", so they flagged some unused accounts and can claim success now?