9 ms·
Tell HN: Twitter suspends arrested Iranian tech blogger’s account
- mehdix 4y ago[IMPORTANT EDIT]: as stated numerous times in comments, this is fine. It is often done to protect victim's account from being further compromised by the adversary, for example for protecting their DMs, or collecting further material from their online activities. So, no need to try unsuspend his account. Thank you. Jadi (Amirhossein Mirmirani) had 133K Twitter followers. He is a lovely computer geek and open source veteran from Tehran, Iran. He has been active educating youth for many years. He was arrested yesterday. His account is suspended after his arrest, which is most probably due to fake reports from the cyber army. If you work at Twitter or Facebook, please help unsuspending his account which is vital for him to reach his audience and give him visibility, even when he is arrested. They want to remove his internet presence. Profile screenshot: https://twitter.com/KavehMadani/status/1577695715131899904/photo/1 https://twitter.com/KavehMadani/status/1577695715131899904/p... His Website in Persian: https://jadi.net https://jadi.net Instagram (suspended): https://www.instagram.com/jadijadinet/ https://www.instagram.com/jadijadinet/
- toni 4y agoMy understanding is that when someone is arrested in Iran, other activists try to shut down that person's social media accounts in order to prevent Iranian authorities going through his/her profiles and gather more incriminating evidence against them. Isn't that what is happening here?
- RektBoy 4y agoI don't think, if you want arrest somebody, you would crawl everything as a part of acquiring evidence before it.
- paranoidrobot 4y agoI believe suspending their account also blocks access to private messages. It would also prevent their account being used to access any private accounts they may follow.
- toni 4y agoThe arrests are not premeditated. They arrest you first, then ask questions
- kjkjadksj 4y agoHow do they even know who to arrest if they supposedly collect evidence after the fact?
- TremendousJudge 4y agoThere is no due process in authoritarian states. Being suspected by someone on the police that you might hold subversive views is enough to get you arrested, tortured, and murdered.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoRight, but as soon as they suspect someone they probably run tools like these. They can be ran faster than it takes to find someone and throw then in a van for sure.
- buscoquadnary 4y agoIf you are an authoritarian state you don't give too much worry about that, if you grab the wrong person "oh well another day another murder." It's about terror and control, not about justice. If you think that's bad wait till you see what the Khmer Rogue did in Cambodia. The precious framework of individual rights, a relatively functioning justice system, and constitutional guarantees may not be perfect here in the US of A, there are issues, and those rights are still being eroded, and we have work to do, but people who draw comparisons between places like the US and China or Iran clearly have no idea what they are talking about, and it's a decent chance they may in fact be part of state sponsored psychological warfare apparatuses.
- MaxPock 4y ago
- andrewinardeer 4y agoDo you have intimate knowledge of Iranian policing playbooks or intinate knowledge of Iranian activists playbooks or are you guessing?
- registeredcorn 4y agoI'm not sure why your being downvoted (or whatever it's called on here). It's a legitimate question. It looks like one person in here claims to have some amount of knowledge on the matter, but it would be good to get some kind of confirmation in either direction before endorsing one tactic, or another.
- iampuero 4y agoThis is probably a very US-centric (or insert-your-country-here-centric) viewpoint that does not hold true everywhere else in the world. Even if it does, it would be idealistic to assume these things continue to hold true during moments of crisis for a state..
- lupire 4y agoIt's not idealistic, it's basic spycraft. Grab what you can before people know they need to hide it.
- bzbarsky 4y agoIn some countries, you arrest people first, then find/manufacture evidence later.
- slim 4y agowe (activists) actually ask social media platforms to suspend the account and publicize it. to avoid the activist being tortured to extract passwords. twitter is doing the right thing
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoSo actually trying to “help” by getting Twitter to reverse the suspension, may actually be the worst thing you can do to him and his fellow activists. Yet another example of how good intentions aren’t enough. You need to fully understand the situation before you act, especially when dealing with a situation that is different from what you are familiar with.
- shswkna 4y agoGood comment that should be on the top. Like another comment said, the suspension might even be to protect him. The thing is we don‘t know either way.
- mehdix 4y agoYes, I stand corrected. I can't edit my top-level comment, otherwise I would have added an explanation.
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago
- O__________O 4y agoYes, this most like is what happened, linked to a news source here to independently support this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106622
- jstarfish 4y agoThis stinks of false-flag psyops. A guy is quietly abducted by an authoritarian regime. Naturally, the smart response would be for "activists" to "help" him by erasing all public record of his existence.
- O__________O 4y agoPlease feel free to provide evidence of how deleting the accounts has made anyone less safe.
- bhelkey 4y agoFolks use Twitter for tweets and for DMs. I have no knowledge here but this could be an attempt to remove all private messages.
- mehdix 4y agoI did not know this. It is fine, then. Also another comment mentions blocking access to DMs, which makes sense. I was unable to edit my top-level comment, otherwise I would have added an explanation. Thanks.
- slim 4y agomaybe @dang can help with this. it's an urgent situation
- mehdix 4y agoI wrote him to edit the top-level comment. Thanks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- avgcorrection 4y agoJust paving the road with some good intentions.
- alex_young 4y agoIt may be a good idea to flag this entire submission until some other action can be taken. It's not great to have all of this discussion about social profile circumvention in the open IMO.
- bioemerl 4y agoI'm doing my part!
- willcipriano 4y agoActivists are apparently unfamiliar with how the internet works: [web archive link redacted] Hopefully the authorities in Iran are similarly ignorant
- toni 4y agoI think the authorities are stupider than what you think. When they arrest someone in a demonstration, they will confiscate their phone and open the apps on the device. If the account is inactive, they can not see anything. May I ask you to delete your comment if that is not a problem? You basically gave the regime an evidence we said the activists are trying to hide away.
- willcipriano 4y agoIf I was kidnapped, beaten and probably in a mass grave don't you dare take down what I said that put me in that position. (Frankly we may be in that spot sooner than you think in the US) That's exactly what the regime wants, to shut him up. He gave his freedom at a minimum, probably his life to say what he said, the least we can do is listen to him.
- toni 4y agoThe suspension is temporary. Presumably when the person is released, Twitter will reinstate the account. The other reason for suspension is to not compromise DMs and followers. But I also understand your point of view in not wanting to delete it.
- Slava_Propanei 4y ago
- decremental 4y agoSo in this hypothetical scenario they don't know about the Internet Archive but they do happen to browse Hacker News? This probably isn't their first rodeo. I'm sure they're aware of the archives that exist.
- wisnoskij 4y agoThat sounds stupid. Iran is an official government agency, they can just ask twitter or some ally like UAE or China to hand over all the information in a form a lot easier for searching through than logging into their account.
- wpietri 4y agoWhat evidence do you have that Twitter will comply with a request like that from Iran? Even when redirected via a government that doesn't have anything to do with the account?
- lupire 4y agoTwitter hired KSA spies that helped kill Jamal Khashoggi. Twitter "compliance" is irrelevant because they have no internal data security.
- oneplane 4y agoThey have to follow the laws of the countries they operate in. Keep in mind that business operations and server locations (and incorporation locations) are not the same thing. If you serve customers in another country, their laws apply. You can either follow the law or not serve in that country. This is pretty much how it has worked forever. This is obviously not great if you have a set of less-restrictive and more-restrictive laws that contradict each other. And it's not great if values, politics and rights in general aren't compatible. As much as we can disagree with what mass-murdering authoritarian regimes are up to, unless we go to war (after we have already applied all the sanctions we can think of) there isn't much you can do about it.
- potency 4y agoSo practically speaking, what will happen if Twitter ignores Iranian law and allows IPs from that country to use their platform anyway? I don't think the US govt will enforce Iranian law for them...
- 4y ago
- benevol 4y agoThis makes no sense. When governments go after their targets, they gather all they can as soon as they define them as targets. Twitter, on the other hand, is known to be a massive censor, just like Youtube/Google.
- bobthepanda 4y agoThe Iran situation is in a lot of flux, so while that may be possible when being methodical about one person, it is less so if you are trying to rapidly detain hundreds or thousands per day.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoThey probably have a script that creates an archive of all social media posts. Not hard to do. As soon as you have a name to point it to you can run this sort of tool.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoYou would think the regime already did this before the arrest
- belter 4y ago
- shitlord 4y ago> His account is suspended after his arrest, which is most probably due to fake reports from the cyber army If this is actually the case, then the reporting system is incredibly broken.
- philipov 4y agoIt's not like commonly targeted groups have been saying this for years or anything, though.
- branon 4y agoTelling that the personal website is the most resistant. Interesting idea that social media accounts could be taken down by good actors as a form of damage control.
- soheil 4y agoProbably for the best until at least when/if he's released.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
- koenvdb 4y agoWhat a weird thing to say.
- SiempreViernes 4y agoPut in a /s if that's how you mean it, nobody can actually hear the sarcasm unless they are next to you and you say what you type out loud.
- RektBoy 4y agoAre you sure it is needed? Twitter is basically pure evil. Everybody knows that. If Elon will be successful with the acquisition, it will become evil^2.
- usui 4y ago
- lioeters 4y ago> Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture saying that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
- rvz 4y agoThis above is obviously sarcasm. When PayPal did the exact same thing and was reported here it was all 'okay' and 'fine' for the big tech appeasers and the responses were 'but private platform', 'they knew they broke the TOS', which is not the point. The entire point is that companies like Twitter and PayPal should not be able to do it for 'no reason', or giving a vague TOS violation without pointing to what exactly was violated. Now it has happened to someone who isn't an 'undesirable', it is now a 'problem' when in fact this have been happening for years. It can happen to anyone, including this tech blogger. It shouldn't be 'guilty until proven innocent'.
- SanjayMehta 4y agoFunny how Twitter tolerates blatantly terrorist regimes like Iran while banning those who challenge them. How do they justify this?
- rvz 4y agoApparently you can also violate the Twitter guidelines without being banned only if you are Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran who has done this for years, here is an example of him calling for violence to 'destroy' another country: [0] Twitter really has one rule for some individuals and another rule for many. There is no justification for any of this from the big tech appeasers. [0] https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1263749566744100864 https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1263749566744100864
- k_sze 4y agoStrictly speaking, the wording isn't a call to violence. It's more like a prediction.
- danso 4y ago> Twitter really has one rule for some individuals and another rule for many. There is no justification for any of this from the big tech appeasers. Huh? Twitter has explicitly justified differential treatment for different kinds of users -- particularly in the name of public interest. Their rules and policies site has a page titled, "About public-interest exceptions on Twitter": https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/public-interest https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/public-intere... > At present, we limit exceptions to one critical type of public-interest content—Tweets from elected and government officials—given the significant public interest in knowing and being able to discuss their actions and statements. > As a result, in rare instances, we may choose to leave up a Tweet from an elected or government official that would otherwise be taken down.
- O__________O 4y agoActivists accounts are taken down to try to protect them. Example news source supporting this is likely what happened: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-diaspora-tech-workers-mobilising-support-protesters https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-diaspora-tech-worker...
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoIn that case it should have made clear by Twitter, etc. "This account has been suspended to protect the user" (or something like that)
- snarf21 4y agoOr it could give plausible deniability. Maybe Twitter is trying to help the activists without explicitly saying so to keep Twitter accessible in Iran.
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoI am not sure about the need for deniability. Iranian gov hates them anyway and nobody will let around a table to discuss the topic. Au least it is good to know that this may (and probably is) the reason.
- O__________O 4y agoThis is not about you, please stop; no reason to believe that either your own well being or life is on the line, nor for that matter, that of your friends and family. Concept of plausible deniability is vital in situations like this for all parties involved. Unless you are able to prove via evidence it is not, please refrain from (repeatedly) commenting on a topic, that at least to me, you appear to be unfamiliar with and has the very real potential to result in physical harm to others. If I have errored in my reasoning, please feel free to explicitly state why. Thanks.
- 4y ago
- nasir 4y agoHe is arrested so probably shut down to protect him
- almog 4y agoPublic twitter profiles are probably being grabbed and indexed by state agencies anyway. Even the general public can use archives of twitter stream grabs to process past tweets: https://archive.org/details/twitterstream https://archive.org/details/twitterstream
- almog 4y agoWould love to know why my comment is being downvoted, that is, if you think that my either of my statement is wrong, please correct me, thanks!
- twobitshifter 4y agoI had interviewed an Iranian in the US a few months ago for a position, but he was not interested in the role we had open. There was a new opening so I looked him up, but now there was nothing. His personal site was gone, and his linkedIn vanished. Google still finds him on scholar and links to the downed page but the only way to see it is the wayback machine.
- fred_dev 4y agoPlease disclose his name if you find it appropriate. When a guy is under arrest, He would be safer if everybody knows his name.
- fred_dev 4y agoJadi would be happy to know that he was on HN:) after getting free. One of his hobbies was selecting news on HN and translating them for non English speakers in Iran. You are on our mind bro. Hope to see you soon in your next podcast. #woman_life_freedom
- timcavel 4y ago
- askhan 4y agoUnless I'm being obtuse, wouldn't it be right for Twitter to state that it's disabled an account to protect the user and others rather than because it violates their rules?
- askhan 4y agoUnless I'm being obtuse, wouldn't it be right for Twitter to state that it’s disabled an account in order to protect the user and others rather than because it violates their rules?
- jovial_cavalier 4y agoWhat the fuck is this insane notion being pushed in this thread? How does having your account suspended protect you? It's probably the primary way that he can get his story out or at the very least let people know that he's alright. Authorities almost certainly have all of the relevant data that has been expunged from the public's view already. And even if they don't, it's on archive.org Some next level doublethink going on in this thread.
- cnagesh 4y agowhy was he arrested ?