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A Twitter employee took down Trump's account for 11 minutes

2 points by carlchenet 9y ago

mattbgates 9y ago
You would think that Twitter would have some type of "master" password where its employees would have to enter it in order to delete an account, and only a few would actually have that kind of authority. But I guess the employee didn't care.. I'm sure they'll blog about how awesome it was.. and half the people will praise and the other half will be outraged. Divided we stand.
- Piskvorrr 9y ago
  I fail to see how this would scale. Twitter is somewhat larger than thousands of users (where such approach would be practical).
  - mattbgates 9y ago
    You are absolutely right. On the "regular user" scale it's nearly impossible. For "celebrity users", it's more scalable and necessary. Everyone is probably logged into their employee account, and on that scale, I would think Twitter would have everything logged, so they know exactly who did it. But for accounts marked with "Celebrity Status", I would have thought they had something in place that blocks their "regular employees" from being able to delete those accounts without approval, and it must go through some approval of a higher-up. So it is definitely scalable in regards to celebrities, even though there are hundreds to thousands on Twitter, I'd think if I was running Twitter, I'd have just a few select who could actually delete celebrity accounts. After all, it is those celebrity accounts bringing in the most page views. Hell, I can't install anything on my computer at work without getting administration approval from the IT guy. All email outside of the work email is banned, simply blocked, to protect the data. We work with highly sensitive data, so all applications installed must go through an approval process, submitted to the higher ups, reasons explained for the need of the application, what it is, and why it is being used for work purposes. So to delete a celebrity account, I would think they would have had similar measures in place. Reasons for deleting the account, approval process, etc.
    - Piskvorrr 9y ago
      There's a thousand celebrities, worldwide? You're underestimating Twitter's scale by orders of magnitude. Moreover, how would Twitter's first-class list be managed? Far, far easier to have a system that allows for mistakes, review and rollback - such as we have seen in action.

2 points by carlchenet 9y ago

You would think that Twitter would have some type of "master" password where its employees would have to enter it in order to delete an account, and only a few would actually have that kind of authority. But I guess the employee didn't care.. I'm sure they'll blog about how awesome it was.. and half the people will praise and the other half will be outraged. Divided we stand.

Piskvorrr 9y ago
I fail to see how this would scale. Twitter is somewhat larger than thousands of users (where such approach would be practical).
- mattbgates 9y ago
  You are absolutely right. On the "regular user" scale it's nearly impossible. For "celebrity users", it's more scalable and necessary. Everyone is probably logged into their employee account, and on that scale, I would think Twitter would have everything logged, so they know exactly who did it. But for accounts marked with "Celebrity Status", I would have thought they had something in place that blocks their "regular employees" from being able to delete those accounts without approval, and it must go through some approval of a higher-up. So it is definitely scalable in regards to celebrities, even though there are hundreds to thousands on Twitter, I'd think if I was running Twitter, I'd have just a few select who could actually delete celebrity accounts. After all, it is those celebrity accounts bringing in the most page views. Hell, I can't install anything on my computer at work without getting administration approval from the IT guy. All email outside of the work email is banned, simply blocked, to protect the data. We work with highly sensitive data, so all applications installed must go through an approval process, submitted to the higher ups, reasons explained for the need of the application, what it is, and why it is being used for work purposes. So to delete a celebrity account, I would think they would have had similar measures in place. Reasons for deleting the account, approval process, etc.
  - Piskvorrr 9y ago
    There's a thousand celebrities, worldwide? You're underestimating Twitter's scale by orders of magnitude. Moreover, how would Twitter's first-class list be managed? Far, far easier to have a system that allows for mistakes, review and rollback - such as we have seen in action.