
Twitter caught auto-deleting retweets? - MR4D
http://ibankcoin.com/zeropointnow/2017/03/23/busted-twitter-caught-manipulating-tweets-of-former-blackrock-fund-manager-critical-of-cia-and-nsa/
======
m52go
Scott Adams, Dilbert creator and Trump commentator, noticed this happening a
while ago too.

[http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-
and...](http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and-facebook-
be-regulated-as)

I follow him and never see his tweets despite spending a lot of time on
TweetDeck throughout the day. When I open the Twitter app, his tweets are
never shown on my 'In case you missed it' section. His tweets typically get
high engagement, definitely higher than other tweets Twitter recommends, so I
find it a bit strange.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Twitter cares about engagement from people you follow specifically. Maybe the
other people you follow hate him.

~~~
m52go
Interesting, I didn't know that.

I tend to follow varied media accounts though, so it's tough to tell from my
media consumption where I'm likely to stand politically.

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JBReefer
This, plus the safety council and the pruning of trending topics is definitely
a pattern. It's also probably counter productive - this lets activists like
Milo campaign on being oppressed for their views, which widens their public
appeal enormously. It also adds to the perception of SV as behind-the-scenes
manipulative, even if that's not true. Finally, it heightens the idea that the
modern Left can't take criticism and is quietly authoritarian, which is
_exactly_ the bogeyman these commentators want​.

If it were just this, I wouldn't believe it, but this is post #1000 about
Twitter deprioritizing conservatives. I don't get why they do it, but then
again, I don't get a lot about Twitter management. These people, and
definitely Milo, would likely fade into obscurity if left alone.

------
raverbashing
Or maybe twitter is actively pruning bots and their activity (and they do RT
with the purpose of adding a facade of legitimacy) instead of the claimed
"persecution"

~~~
MR4D
I'd like to agree with you, but why kill the retweets, and not disable the
accounts, too? (I've seen this on my own twitter account, and the retweeting
accounts are seemingly never disabled.)

~~~
dqv
If the spammer gets disabled, it's a clear indicator that they should create a
new account or use some other means of circumvention. This appears to be the
"shadow ban" method.

------
parenthephobia
Given the articles on the sidebar, I am inclined to require independent
corroboration of these claims.

If Twitter is taking the time to censor tweets critical of the government,
then they're doing a bad job. Certainly, if I was Twitter and wanted to
silence Dowd without people noticing that I was doing it, I'd just shadowban
him.

> Either eleven people decided to un-retweet Dowd within five minutes of each
> other, or Twitter decided to censor a tweet critical of the government by
> limiting it’s visibility.

Or, Twitter, being a very large and complex distributed system, sometimes has
to show an approximation of things like re-tweet and follower counts.

Or, Twitter, wanting to make it harder for spammers to game their systems,
deliberately shows users delayed or only kinda accurate stats.

Or a mixture of 1, 3, and 4.

~~~
mintplant
> Mass Effect: Andromeda – Sucky Animations, Bigoted Designer And Fugly
> Females Lead To Canceled Pre-Orders

> WHITE EVIL: New ‘Mass Effect’ Excludes White Character Creation In Ongoing
> SJW Assault On A Race

> Emotional Trey Gowdy Warns Anyone Obstructing Pedo Investigations To Be
> Disemboweled By The Sword Of Justice

Uh, yeah, I don't think this source belongs on Hacker News.

~~~
MR4D
Would you prefer dilbert?

[http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-
and...](http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156377416856/should-twitter-and-facebook-
be-regulated-as)

Also, note that the guy referred to in the article is a reputable former
Blackrock fund manager. You can check out his twitter feed as well if you
don't like this source.

[https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/844927816604934145](https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/844927816604934145)

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patrickg_zill
There is a list of alt right accounts to be killed, supposedly leaked from a
Twitter employee.

Some of them have in fact been suspended since the list came out. Just a
coincidence? I do not know...

If they will suspend accounts, suppress auto-complete on certain hashtags, why
wouldn't they mess with other things too?

~~~
aaronchall
This is quite an allegation. Please provide a link to evidence that this
happened. Thanks!

~~~
patrickg_zill
The behavior that I saw, was a hashtag auto-complete working, then, after it
became more popular, it would not complete.

In some cases a wrongly spelled hashtag would auto-complete and the original
would not, even if you were to spell everything but the very last character.

That's the behavior. The motivation or code behind that behavior, I can
speculate about but cannot prove.

Twitter charges for the custom icons that show up, e.g. the BLM three brown
circles.

An ad agency used by the RNC (EDIT: actually the Trump campaign) had offered
to spend $5 million for a custom icon for a hashtag they wanted to use.

@jack personally scotched it, even though the vetting process had already been
gone through and the funds from the agency allocated. That is circumstantial
evidence that gives a possible motive.

[https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-
eb7e48c...](https://medium.com/@garycoby/twitter-restricts-trump-
eb7e48ccf5ff#.6d05tfm7w)

------
fencepost
Frankly, I'd attribute this to a combination of "server farm" issues where
lower-importance things like retweet counts may be pulling from slightly stale
data and to actively nuking the apparently pretty massive "egg" bot networks
that seem to be a problem on Twitter these days.

~~~
giarc
I think you could be right. I remember reading somewhere about the difference
between twitter and Facebook. The Facebook newsfeed doesn't need to be in
chronological order since they are trying to figure out what is important to
you. Twitter has recently changed to do something similar. Therefore it's
plausible that something funky is going on that has nothing to do with Twitter
censoring particular users.

Also, why allow Dowd to only have a few but then let Alex Jones have nearly
600K. I'm not saying the two are the same, but seems like rules would be
unevenly applied if the truth was twitter was censoring.

------
jackfrodo
What a garbage website. This author also wrote

>Bioware has been invaded by Social Justice Warriors; millennial feminists who
believe the white-male dominated “patriarchy” is the reason opinionated
purple-haired land whales aren’t landing jobs.

Everyone knows it's bots that mainly follow these people anyway.

~~~
JBReefer
Who's everyone? It's critical to remember that outside of the cities, the US
is a fairly conservative country, and they use Twitter too.

------
mschuster91
It's easy to monitor what happens. Use the Twitter API to monitor your
notifications in streaming mode, record all RT events, and check periodically
which of the tweets (each RT is actually shown as a separate tweet in the API,
with its text attribute set to RT @user <snippet>, for backwards compatibility
with old clients, while modern clients can see it's a RT from extended
attributes) still appear in the RTing user's feeds.

Come to me with hard data and we'll talk but right now this looks like Twitter
is just tighting the screws on botnets which many "conservatives" aka alt
rights use to bolster their egos.

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campuscodi
I've noticed Twitter auto-unfollowed many of my friends. Happened on three
different occasions.

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TazeTSchnitzel
Perhaps conservatives attract more spambot followers. (Or as many as anyone
else.)

If you believe the stuff about the Kremlin, that would make sense.

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bassman9000
[https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/TWTR?p=TWTR#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9y...](https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/TWTR?p=TWTR#eyJtdWx0aUNvbG9yTGluZSI6ZmFsc2UsImJvbGxpbmdlclVwcGVyQ29sb3IiOiIjZTIwMDgxIiwiYm9sbGluZ2VyTG93ZXJDb2xvciI6IiM5NTUyZmYiLCJtZmlMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjNDVlM2ZmIiwibWFjZERpdmVyZ2VuY2VDb2xvciI6IiNmZjdiMTIiLCJtYWNkTWFjZENvbG9yIjoiIzc4N2Q4MiIsIm1hY2RTaWduYWxDb2xvciI6IiMwMDAwMDAiLCJyc2lMaW5lQ29sb3IiOiIjZmZiNzAwIiwic3RvY2hLTGluZUNvbG9yIjoiI2ZmYjcwMCIsInN0b2NoRExpbmVDb2xvciI6IiM0NWUzZmYiLCJyYW5nZSI6IjZtbyJ9)

------
Spoom
I'm expecting this to be a Hanlon's razor type deal. Anyone have an idea what
might be causing this from a technical perspective?

~~~
xfax
Probably a combination of bot behavior, lag ("eventual consistency") and
deliberate probabilistic approach to user-facing analytics.

------
williamtrask
I'll put my money on someone hacking Twitter before I'd put it on the platform
itself.

