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Twitter Will Crack Down on Serial Trolls by Tracking Their Phone Number
- tom-lord 12y ago> It’s not a perfect solution — the troll could abandon the banned account and open a new one without supplying a number Yeah, that's a slight flaw in this plan, isn't it?... I guess the only real benefit of this new system is that admins can be more trigger-happy on (temporarily) banning accounts.
- acveilleux 12y agoBanning? DOesn't seem like banning. It's more likely to allow accounts that have lots of flagging to be automatically shunted to an automatable verification step. Accounts that pass verification can then be worth human attention. Accounts that do not attempt verification end up muted. Seems like a reasonable way to scale human intervention in the face of cheap, broad usage of throwaways by trolls.
- thebouv 12y agoFlagging-to-verification-to-muting -- funny enough, probably mostly going to be used by trolls to flag the people they're trolling.
- smegel 12y ago> It’s not a perfect solution — the troll could abandon the banned account and open a new one without supplying a number Surely such devious machinations is beyond the capability of mere trolls...
- psykovsky 12y agoNo idea how it is in the US, where I live a disposable SIM card costs €2,5 with €5 credit...
- gambiting 12y agoIn UK any phone provider will happily send you a dozen Sim cards for free if you fill out a form on their website. Most will give you some credit just for activating the number.
- psykovsky 12y agoHere also, but I was thinking a troll trying to hide his identity wouldn't be very keen to give their address in such a case and would prefer to pay with cash instead, no names given.
- pervycreeper 12y agoIt's worse than that, it will have no effect on trolls, but privacy conscious users who have an established following will now be at the absolute mercy of report brigaders if they happen to run afoul of the wrong people.
- maxerickson 12y agoIs there a lot of evidence that Twitter bans accounts based just on reports from these brigaders?
- Drakim 12y ago> It’s not a perfect solution — the troll could abandon the banned account and open a new one without supplying a number Uhmm, I guess they could just scrap this entire plan and ask "Are you a troll?" with a checkbox at the signup page.
- breakingcups 12y agoThat checkbox goes right next to Google's new "I'm not a robot" CAPTCHA checkbox, doesn't it?
- aestetix 12y agoI guess Twitter hasn't ever heard of Google Voice. Or prepaid phone numbers. Or the concept of using a different IP address to register an account. This isn't even security theatre. This is like some seventh graders cosplaying security for their parents and calling it theatre.
- simplicio 12y agoEh, the idea obviously isn't to make it impossible to troll. Just to make it more trouble than its worth for some meaningful fraction of potential trolls.
- arfliw 12y agoCraigslist is pretty effective at stopping those types of evasion. They ban VOIP phone numbers, for instance.
- ceejayoz 12y ago> I guess Twitter hasn't ever heard of Google Voice. Or prepaid phone numbers. I've run into services that won't take either. They're in known blocks of numbers.
- middleclick 12y agoIn countries like India (which is a police state), it is not possible to get a phone/SIM/internet connection without giving your government ID and photograph. I am not sure how it can work for most countries where you don't need to give any ID and disposable SIM cards are cheap.
- bad_user 12y ago> disposable SIM cards are cheap One disposable SIM card is cheap. In Romania it's about $5, coming with initial credit on it as well. But multiply by 1000 and then you're talking about $5000 versus zero, plus the hassle of verifying each of those accounts. And because it has been a practice to sell cheap calls by VoIP services piggybacking on special offers for PrePay SIM cards, the GSM operators now have protections of their own, so it will be expensive to automate this.
- denzil_correa 12y agoPersonally, the Twitter policy is good from an Indian perspective. The number of political trolls are countless and one would be literally hounded if you have an alternate opinion.
- middleclick 12y agoIn countries like India (which is a police state), it is not possible to get a phone/SIM/internet connection without giving your government ID and photograph. I am not sure how it can work for most countries where you don't need to give any ID and disposable SIM cards are cheap.
- gabemart 12y agoComments here seem very negative. If they do some basic tracking of users between accounts, e.g. based on IP address, cookies or browser fingerprint, they could easily do some kind of probabalistic determination of whether or not a potential new account is a troll's puppet or not, and if it is, ask for a phone number immediately. Phone verification won't stop 100% of puppeting, but what percentage of potential trolls are willing to go to the hassle/expense of getting a throwaway phone number just to get a new twitter account? 10%? 1%?
- Sir_Substance 12y agoI don't want to give my number to twitter, regardless of whether they think I resemble a troll. False positives happen. Oh, let me guess, if I don't like it I don't have to use it, right? I wish that worked when the police asked for your phone number...
- ptaipale 12y agoWisecracking: if you don't use phone, you don't have a number that you would have to give to them...
- bikeshack 12y agoAgreed. Just like Facebook's real name policy, the classification system for what Twitter deems a "troll account" is going to be hard to codify and ascertain. In terms of harassment, though, there is a definite clear cut definition of that, but the term "troll" has many blurred lines.
- pjc50 12y agoI'd be much happier with IP banning or browser fingerprinting than extracting extra personal information. I'd like to find the middle ground that allows banning of harassers without handing everyone participating in a demonstration hashtag (e.g. Tahrir, Turkey, Hong Kong) over to the police.
- aaronbasssett 12y agohttp://www.burnerapp.com/ http://www.burnerapp.com/
- anon4 12y agoThis seems ripe for abuse. So I just need to flag someone's account as abusive (and god knows there's always a way to frame something as abusive) a few times and they can never register with that email and/or phone number? Didn't we already have an article here about a woman who posted a somewhat tasteless joke which cost her her entire career? Would the people that piled on her be considered abusers or not? Would she be considered abusive or not? (In that case, I think the answer is both - her joke was abusive and she suffered abuse in return) I do like that people at twitter are at least trying to think of something.
- arrrg 12y agoThe big problem here are the horrific amounts of harassment and abuse on Twitter, not a couple of false positives. Why do people in these parts always zero in on that right away? So what, some people can’t use Twitter anymore even though they didn’t do anything wrong. If this can still be somewhat effective in reducing abuse it does much more good than harm – and by god, Twitter really has to at least try stuff, like, yesterday.
- eropple 12y agoY'know, I've noticed that too. I have people who don't like me on Twitter. Strangely enough, I don't fear a hissing cabal spam-flagging me off of it. Maybe because I don't do things that people don't like, like send rape threats to an academic because she's going "hey, games are kinda shitty about women, can we talk about this?". My hunch is that certain folks around here concentrate on the hypothetical false positives (which, frankly, I doubt exist in any significant numbers, but boy can I point at abuse victims on Twitter!), by and large, because the people doing those shitty things look and act more like your average tech nerd than the people actually getting hurt. If you look at the GamerGate jerks, it looks like tech, you see most of the same subgroups represented within it. It's tribal crap writ large.
- MollyR 12y agoI notice you talk about gamergate alot, but have you dealt with anti-vaxxers,militant atheists/christians/muslims, or justin bieber/one direction/ taylor swift fans? One wrong comment might get you targeted by the crazy amount of subgroups on twitter who do harass and bully people. I actually don't use twitter, because it's too easy to get harassed by so many different groups who will bully you over tons of things. I think twitter on the whole, is great study of human tribal behavior. The 140 characters, lack of context,followers, everything about the very core of twitter enables narcissism ,in-group/out-grouping, and abuse. I think its time twitter goes away.
- blackbagboys 12y agoPerfectly reasonable disagreements with certain segments of the twitterati are enough to cause them to 'rally the troops' to flag accounts into oblivion. I can't think of any mechanism to halt 'trolling' that won't be abused itself. Twitter is between a rock and a hard place here.
- ojegawojahe 12y agoIt's really sad how many of the comments in this thread boil down to 'a different problem might occur, so let's never change.' It's a good thing that real entrepreneurs have abandoned this shithole and it's naysaying attitudes.
- jrometty 12y agoIts not just twitter. Trolling is a problem that afflicts a majority of internet services. I commend their attempt to reduce the issue without reducing mass user freedom, even if their proposal isn't a perfect fix.
- hobo_mark 12y agoWhy is the same man who's behind Square so reluctant to make people (and companies!) pay for "verified" accounts like we do for domains?
- uptown 12y agoI can't speak to why he isn't supporting that concept, but it'd likely substantially constrain growth. Many current and potential users would simply opt not to pay. Others would cut down the number of accounts they maintain. And it would also potentially change the overall demographic of the user-base, even if the charge was nominal.
- VeejayRampay 12y agoBah. Let trolls be trolls, being miserable enough that it drives you to try to make others as miserable as you is punition enough anyway.
- metaphorm 12y agoI'm skeptical that this will work. The system seems both easily evaded by trolls and easily abused by "counter-trolls" (for lack of a better term).
- hyperpape 12y agoWhile there's a lot of reason to be dubious that this can scale to deal with all of Twitter's troll problems, bear in mind that there are people who are literally using Twitter to make death threats (I don't think it makes sense to call people who do that "trolls", as they're far worse, but I guess that's a losing battle). A system designed to catch "I'm gonna rape and kill you" can be a lot dumber and closer to automated than something designed to moderate all comments (I don't think twitter should be moderating comments. I do think they should be trying to address threats).
- iLoch 12y agoIsn't this the kind of thing that only works by obscuring the method you use? If you tell the trolls you're going to use their number to track them then they're obviously not going to use their number when they create a new account.