
Twitter Sidestepped Russian Account Warnings, Former Worker Says - rbanffy
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-11-03/former-twitter-employee-says-fake-russian-accounts-were-not-taken-seriously
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dogruck
Duplicate:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15625216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15625216)

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iokevins
From the article:

"Anything we would do that would slow down signups, delete accounts, or remove
accounts had to go through the growth team," Miley said. "They were more
concerned with growth numbers than fake and compromised accounts."

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ben_jones
It's almost as if influential figures and _community forums_ have been spewing
"fake it 'til you make it" heavily for the last decade...

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MBCook
Why it’s almost as if there can be really REALLY big downside to “move fast
and break things”.

At a certain point you get to a scale where you really have to take the stuff
into account. But no one seems to be doing that among these big companies.

I saw a quote earlier today that said Facebook has something like 200 to
300,000,000 fake accounts. That puts those fake accounts as something like the
fifth biggest “country“ on Earth.

At the sizes ignoring these kind of problems and not actively trying to
find/fix them before they happen seems just reckless to me. But given that
Twitter can’t even keep the most basic harassment under control…

I mean is there anyway to fix this at this point? I don’t know what kind of
law could be passed to fix it, I doubt it would be constitutional, and I doubt
the government would be willing to pass in the first place anyway.

If the companies get this big and have no sense of social responsibility are
we just screwed?

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ycaccount
I'm still not clear if this is related to the forensic analysis of the DNC
leak? Is the narrative now that American voters fell for social engineering
perpetuated by Russian actors? So the attack was a psychological operation, in
coordination with Paul Manafort's bad business practices 10 years ago...? How
is this 'what happened' in light of Donna Brazil's new revelations?

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ceedan
Nobody is surprised by this. Nobody.

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kurthr
It's interesting how surprise and outrage can be orthogonal.

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aaroninsf
Indeed.

The amoral (and I use that word precisely) shading into unethical cowboy
culture of many lions of the contemporary bubble/industry playing field, have
set the industry up for a major backlash.

That's why the big three changed tune this week viz. Congressional inquiry.
Just as no one is surprised, everyone knows the writing is on the wall.

Harsh oversight is coming; if these firms want a voice when it's being
crafted, the only productive posture to assume at this point is one of
acquiescence accompanied by increasingly directly worded mea culpa.

