
Twitter Sidestepped Russian Account Warnings, Former Worker Says - walterclifford
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-03/former-twitter-employee-says-fake-russian-accounts-were-not-taken-seriously
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sulam
This article is one-sided and full of factual inaccuracies.

Leslie did not start the product safety safety and security team in 2014 -- it
had been started long before he arrived. He didn't even start the engineering
arm of it, which also existed long before he arrived. While I can't say so
conclusively, I also do not believe he was the head of engineering at Slack. I
believe that was/is Michael Lopp (@rands).

Twitter has regularly been deleting spam, bot, and fake follower clusters for
years, at a massive level. A cluster of Turkish fake followers was discovered
in my time there and deleting it threw off user growth numbers for the quarter
and also forward-looking guidance. That predictably had a negative effect on
the stock. I'm sure there was discussion about what the right thing to do was,
but they took the action that hurt them financially (both at the company and
individual level) over the easy path.

Twitter is not perfect, but the people I worked with there were honestly
trying very hard to strike a balance between protecting free speech and
removing bad actors from the system.

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sulam
Btw, just to put more fact-checkable names against my claims:

Bob Lord starting the security team at Twitter. Moxie started the platform
engineering wing of security. Del Harvey either started or was a very early
employee that went on to lead product safety and still does so today.

Leslie started after all of these people and had a relatively short tenure. He
probably did have something to do with user login (that was after my time),
but that was and likely still is a very small team.

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dashundchen
Related article which came out a few days ago, concerning high profile alt-
right Twitter personalities, which turned out to be Russian run accounts.

[http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/presidential/russ...](http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/presidential/russia-
fake-twitter-facebook-posts-accounts-trump-election-jenna-
abrams-20171103.html?amphtml=y&mobi=true)

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empath75
if twitter ever gave an honest accounting of their real users, the stock would
tank and they’d probably be facing shareholder lawsuits.

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gop77
They have no idea what's going on.

I travel a lot and the number of countries where society has gone nuts is
unbelievable.

There was a time when people who had experience working a crisis stepped in
and worked it. As in things moved forward towards better solutions. Now they
spend their entire day being distracted and reacting to noise generated on
social media by people who have no experience doing anything other than making
noise.

If Youtube/Twitter/FB et al don't handle and own all these unintended
consequences in the same manner they do software bugs we are headed to Chinese
style network control very soon.

~~~
willvarfar
The article is saying that they have a good idea what is going on but have no
incentive to "clean up" the platform and detect "fake" content.

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dogruck
Sounds like Twitter has a flawed internal culture. I expect many rats will
start paddling away from the ship.

