Social Media networking site Twitter says it has shut down at least 125,000 accounts connected to Islamic militant group ISIS. Evidently instead of using an algorithm Twitter is relying on users to help flag suspect accounts. However, since the rules for Twitter prohibit “hate speech harassment and promoting terrorist activity” that seems to leave things wide open for interpretation. Each time an account is flagged it is then reviewed by a Twitter employee and either shut down or the claim is dismissed. By the companies own admission, it is an imperfect system. In a blog posting by the Financial Times:
“However the company admitted that identifying violations could be difficult. “There is no ‘magic algorithm’ for identifying terrorist content on the internet, so global online platforms are forced to make challenging judgment calls based on very limited information and guidance,” the company said.”
While I detest ISIS and other extremist groups as much as the next girl, I fear that this policy leaves too much room for abuse. Case in point, Breitbart London columnist Milo Yiannapoulos (formerly @Nero on Twitter) had his account unverified by the company recently.
https://twitter.com/nero/status/685601754654871552
Hell even Lena Dunham has handed over her account to an administrator since she doesn’t feel that Twitter is a “safe space”-yes really.
Not that it's anything to be so proud of, but I do still compose my own tweets :/
— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) September 30, 2015
And while I won’t miss Tweets like this from ISIS and their ilk:
I must confess that I will miss the boneheads giving away their locations by forgetting to turn off the geo-location on Twitter. After all how else are we going to ensure they receive our care packages??
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