
Large number of Twitter accounts critical of China suspended - lawrenceyan
https://twitter.com/YaxueCao/status/1134607732718407680
======
jmccaf
Twitter Takes Down Accounts of China Dissidents Ahead of Tiananmen Anniversary

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/business/twitter-china-
ti...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/business/twitter-china-
tiananmen.html)

""" In a statement, Twitter said that as a part of its routine efforts to stop
spam and inauthentic behavior, it had inadvertently gone after a number of
legitimate Chinese-language accounts.

“These accounts were not mass reported by the Chinese authorities — this was
routine action on our part,” the company said in a statement on Twitter.
“Sometimes our routine actions catch false positives or we make errors. We
apologize.”

Online, many users said they did not believe Twitter’s statement told the
whole story. """

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DyslexicAtheist
on a similar note the documentary "The Gate of Heavenly Peace," far the best
history of the 1989 Tiananmen protests and mass carnage, is available in two
parts on YouTube [https://youtu.be/1Gtt2JxmQtg](https://youtu.be/1Gtt2JxmQtg)

people need to be reminded that China hasn't changed in the way they treat
anyone critical of this regime. and there are far to many China apologists
sitting in power in Silicon Valley (at YC Sam Altman is a prominent case)

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rococode
How does something large scale like this happen? Is it possible to get an
account suspended solely by mass reporting of Tweets, or does it require some
level of internal access to Twitter?

The former would just mean Twitter needs to tweak their suspension procedures
a bit. The latter would be quite worrisome due to the various implications
(security breach, internal oversight and approval, rogue employee, etc.).

~~~
octosphere
Most of the accounts were probably registered normally with en email address
and a handle, only until Twitter presented the accounts with a 'Please verify
the account with a phone number', and then they got flagged and banned.

There used to be a loophole in Twitter where you could register accounts _en
masse_ (without phone verification), but they have since clamped down on this
and now you have to go through rigorous verification steps to prove you're not
some bot or trying to run a propaganda campaign.

~~~
locknumber110
But if one is some running bots for a propaganda campaign that's friendly to
Twitter investors' interests, one magically doesn't run into those sorts of
verification hoops.

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smnscu
They've also restricted my account for no apparent reason a few days ago, and
because the account is associated to an older phone number I have no choice
but to wait for the mercy of Twitter Support. Makes my lazy ass ponder about
the importance of federated solutions such as Mastodon.

~~~
sneak
You can’t reuse a verification number across usernames; one of my accounts is
locked and wants a phone, but the one I put in is “already in use on another
account”.

sigh.

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marak830
As long as we keep (as a whole) letting a country that ground dissidents to a
paste and washed the result down the sewers, drive our collective greed, we're
fucked.

Note I'd prefer not to use the term greed above, it's just the most succinct
for the situation but it is the reality.

Minus the invasion, we are pre ww2, concentration camps are happening and we
are doing business with those practioners.

I and everyone I have an influence on, are refusing to buy Chinese goods,
that's the limit of my power (which is fuck all honestly).

~~~
Cyberdog
> I and everyone I have an influence on, are refusing to buy Chinese goods,
> that's the limit of my power (which is fuck all honestly).

What device did you type this message on? Odds are very high it was assembled
in China with a significant portion, if not majority, of Chinese-made
components, and the company that sold it to you either has a significant
presence in the Chinese market, or wishes it did.

I understand the concern here, but for better or worse, China is where pretty
much anything that uses transistors is made, and it's just not practical to
boycott _everything_ that passes through there.

(Not to mention that it's not really fair to punish Chinese business-owners
for the actions of their government when they have even less accountability
over it than we do over ours. Is it fair for people of other countries to not
buy from American companies because of our government's absurd incarceration
rates?)

~~~
pavel_lishin
[https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha](https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha)

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AnaniasAnanas
This is exactly why we must support decentralized and censorship-resistant
alternatives. Mastodon and Pleroma are steps in the right direction.

