
Baffled student tells Twitter: 'I'm not a Chinese agent' - rakkhi
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49416617
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seren
I can't help but feels some sense of entitlement though the story. How dare
they to ban me from Twitter ?

If you paid a consultant and suddenly your number of followers greatly
increase, aren't you a bit naive to think this was due to genuine interest ?
Even more so, if you are positioning yourself as a cybersecurity expert.

The interesting point was about the lack (or ban from) of twitter account and
potential career prospect.

~~~
input_sh
> If you paid a consultant and suddenly your number of followers greatly
> increase, aren't you a bit naive to think this was due to genuine interest ?

I'm with you apart from this sentence. What can you do after the damage was
done? I'd assume they thought the consultant was legitimate, the opposite
proved to be the case, and the two of them had no idea what to do afterwards.
Ask bots to unfollow you? Create a new account and lose the legitimate ones
you'd have regardless of this? Admit to Twitter's support that you gave access
to someone illegitimate?

Their situation admittedly sucks, but I have no clue how would I undo the
damage if I made the same mistake.

~~~
majewsky
> Create a new account and lose the legitimate ones you'd have regardless of
> this?

This. On the old account, tweet something like "I worked with a consultant who
turned out to just sell fake followers. I want to leave those behind, so
please follow my new account @foobar instead."

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input_sh
> "I had a social media freelancer supporting the start of the accounts,”
> Marin said, "and I suspect he bought some Twitter followers/bots, which I
> thought explained the suspension - until today.”

An uneducated assumption: that freelancer gave API access to some app usually
used by Chinese propagandists, Luka and his father didn't go through the
authorized apps since, and Twitter decided to really not dig deep into this
false positive, but superficially confirmed that this account indeed gave
access to some app that it shouldn't have.

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kerng
This story doesn't shine a good light on the student, especially if he wants
to be in the field of security he should be more savvy.

Either he bought followers, or gave suspicious apps authorization to post on
his behalf, or his account was hacked.

None of the three seem good.

~~~
luckylion
> Either he bought followers, or gave suspicious apps authorization to post on
> his behalf, or his account was hacked.

In the latter two, Twitter could easily prove that he was part of the
influence network by producing the tweets that were made via his account.

And buying followers is against TOS (but do they ban people for that? #doubt),
but certainly not everybody that has fake followers is declared to be an actor
in a state-sponsored misinformation campaign.

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elliotpage
Sounds like the exact thing a Chinese agent would say!

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AFascistWorld
[https://twitter.com/GeniusWu/status/1164029417737207808](https://twitter.com/GeniusWu/status/1164029417737207808)

China News Service invites paying some 1.25 million yuan for 580,000
followers.

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teekert
1 False positive so far? Wow, that is quite a specific (but perhaps not
sensitive) algorithm they have!

~~~
makomk
One false positive so far who obviously isn't even in China - that seems like
something that would be really easy for Twitter to check. We don't know about
the number of false positives amongst people who are actually Chinese, in
China, and using VPNs to access Twitter (which are the signals Twitter claimed
to have been using) and we probably never never.

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tombh
Tldr; seems to be that the student bought followers, which is what likely
associated the account with Chinese-run bot networks, etc.

~~~
consp
Which is also a valid reason to suspend the account. He (or his dad) was
foolish and this article is overstating the cause of the suspension which is
entirely his own (by buying followers though a shady person/company).

