…and: just got the response from Twitter. And the obvious doxxing “hasn’t broken their safety policy.”
:: sigh ::
Out of all the things that are breaking on Twitter, this kinda thing is absolutely the worst. It’s been escalated to the police by the author in question, and considering the profile this person has, in the past this would have been escalated to the appropriate people at the Twitter Trust and Safety Council: but that no longer exists.
@Banquet_Bear serious question - why do you stay on Twitter? Surely continuing to use it, despite things like this and all the other stuff you’ve highlighted, is not going to incentivise them to change what they’re doing?
…well I’m still posting here, and this place has made me more miserable than anything that has ever happened on Twitter.
But NZ Twitter is still going strong. It’s a community of indigenous and trans supporting people and until they find somewhere else to go, I’ll just keep following along. My goal isn’t to incentivise change. Just sticking with the people who sometimes bring joy to my life until they either find a new place to go, or Elon brings it all to an end.
I’m glad to hear that Musk’s $44B investment is on track to make no money. I was rather concerned about the impact this vanity project might have on the finances of the world’s wealthiest man.
I have to say, simple searches are really turning up a lot of porn now. Also, I’ve been persistently blocking, promoted accounts, and now some real weird shit is coming through Also, I’ve been persistently blocking, promoted accounts on your suggestion, and now some real weird shit is coming through.
TLDR, Twitter’s recommendation algorithm actively promotes content featuring child sexual abuse to users whose searches and viewing activity reflect an interest in this content.
So many questions. I had no idea Twitter was a hive for child porn. I’ve never felt so moral in my life. I rarely even see regular porn on my feed, let alone that shit. The thing is … if a video is viewed 120,000 times on Twitter, why aren’t those 120,000 viewers getting a visit from the FBI? That’s got to be a relatively easy thing to track. It’s Twitter not the Silk Road, ferchrissakes.
Because the FBI and law enforcement generally does not have the time and resources to investigate 120,000 people over one Twitter video. They’re far more interested in the one person who posted the video, as opposed to however many tens of thousands who may have seen it inadvertently and thus been a waste of time to investigate. In a perfect world they’d want to check out everybody, but in the practical world they are vastly more interested in the disseminators of the material.
And even then resources are limited and it may not be worth their time if it were just the one video by one troll. Law enforcement-wise they want bang for the buck.
One thing I find mildly funny - all these people quote $8/month for Android, but it’s been $7/month with annual billing for a while. I assume most people who are going to buy a blue check mark would do it for more than a month at a time.
There is no such deal for iOS though.
Also, kind of amusing that even if you buy a blue checkmark, you’re still getting 50% of the ads.
So a vid shows up in your feed through zero fault of your own and now you should be investigated by the FBI?
Remind me to send you all sorts of “interesting” stuff so you can be investigated repeatedly. Surely they’ll find something the 10th time they look at you. If nothing else, you’re sure to be flagged as a repeat POI. Which is obviously the sure sign of a bad actor.
If you’re going to send it to me, I don’t think it is me who will be investigated. Look, all I’m saying is that if there are feeds dedicated to this stuff and they are frequented, “Hey Twitter, you need to tell us who @humberthumbert is,” seems a lot easier than cracking the dark web.
Okay, first amendment warriors, let’s stop picking nits. Again, all I’m saying is that busting this kind of stuff MUST be easier than busting the deep web stuff. It’s all up on Twitter servers and Internet Providers storage or whatever. Look, I’m not Mike Lindell - I don’t know about all these fancy computer machines - but I know that World Wide Web sites are infinitely more un-secure than deep web evilry.
Generally speaking, authorities go after the distribution of illegal content (be it child porn or pirated movies or whatever) rather than the receiving end. This allows them to focus their efforts on the people putting it out there (including hopefully stopping the people making it) and skips all the “I opened that Tweet on accident” stuff since you’re not accidentally hosting/posting the material. It’s just a better use of resources to stop the guy making it available to 120,000 people before going after the 120,000 people themselves.
Mind you, it’s not necessarily as easy as “Hey, Twitter, tell me who posted/viewed that video” either since (a) often people distributing are overseas and (b) people use virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide their location, especially when doing illegal stuff. And the VPNs are often owned by companies overseas. So someone in North Carolina connects to a server in Estonia and uses that connection to get on Twitter. If the FBI gets the logs from Twitter, it just shows that he connected via a location in Estonia. Trying to get the server in Estonia to cough up who connected (and that might have been from another server) is another matter entirely.
The year 21023 is going to be a banner year for Musk enterprises! Especially because Elmo – now in the form of a Neuralink chip living in a pickle jar – will be confidently predicting the colonization of Mars within 20 years!