Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accounts, Study Finds

Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by ambulancechaser on Friday February 08, 2019 @12:18PM (#19116418)

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.

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Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by adriveatrain on Friday February 08, 2019 @02:20PM (#19117708)

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

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Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by untog on Friday February 08, 2019 @05:42PM (#19119383)

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.

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Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by adriveatrain on Saturday February 09, 2019 @08:32AM (#19122147)

They didn't extend such protections to schoolchild Nick Sandmann

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

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Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by untog on Saturday February 09, 2019 @09:55AM (#19122562)

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

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Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by adriveatrain on Saturday February 09, 2019 @10:34AM (#19122755)

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

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Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by untog on Saturday February 09, 2019 @07:38PM (#19125685)

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

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Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by adriveatrain on Sunday February 10, 2019 @09:31AM (#19127875)

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

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Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by untog on Sunday February 10, 2019 @10:04AM (#19128014)

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

This isn't complex.

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Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by adriveatrain on Monday February 11, 2019 @03:41AM (#19132910)

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

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Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by adriveatrain on Sunday February 10, 2019 @01:11AM (#19126581)

And he got 1 response.

Not very effective.

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Re:Twitter Still Can't Keep Up with Its Flood of Junk Accoun... by pacerwpg on Friday February 08, 2019 @05:23PM (#19119251)

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.

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