

Twitter Will Crack Down on Serial Trolls by Tracking Their Phone Number - sunilkumarc
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/26/twitter-phone-number-tracking/

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tom-lord
> 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.

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acveilleux
Banning? 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
Flagging-to-verification-to-muting -- funny enough, probably mostly going to
be used by trolls to flag the people they're trolling.

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gabemart
Comments 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%?

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Sir_Substance
I 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...

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ptaipale
Wisecracking: if you don't use phone, you don't have a number that you would
have to give to them...

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blackbagboys
Perfectly 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.

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jrometty
Its 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.

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smegel
> 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...

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pervycreeper
It'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.

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maxerickson
Is there a lot of evidence that Twitter bans accounts based just on reports
from these brigaders?

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Drakim
> 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.

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breakingcups
That checkbox goes right next to Google's new "I'm not a robot" CAPTCHA
checkbox, doesn't it?

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anon4
This 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.

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arrrg
The 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.

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eropple
Y'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.

~~~
philh
> 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?".

Or like being an academic who is going "hey, games are kinda shitty about
women, can we talk about this?"?

You seem to be suggesting that if we don't say anything to upset anyone, we
don't have anything to worry about. That doesn't seem satisfactory, to me.

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middleclick
In 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.

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bad_user
> _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.

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hyperpape
While 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).

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iLoch
Isn'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.

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metaphorm
I'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).

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hobo_mark
Why is the same man who's behind Square so reluctant to make people (and
companies!) pay for "verified" accounts like we do for domains?

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uptown
I 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.

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VeejayRampay
Bah. Let trolls be trolls, being miserable enough that it drives you to try to
make others as miserable as you is punition enough anyway.

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aestetix
I 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.

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simplicio
Eh, 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.

