It's a good disclosure, so I don't want to remove the merit out of it.<p>But it also shows they have the capacity to target and remove accounts when they need to, but they let bots run rampant.<p>Last week I quoted HN on twitter, and the article name contained something about a pirated instagram account.<p>In under a minute, I received a dozen answers to that tweet, phishing attempts by bots pretenting they could help me with what they thougth was me, loosing my insta account.<p>So twitter can easily find them: setup a honeypot, wait for bots to show up, ban them to oblivion.<p>Since the service is now playing a game where you need to provide your phone number to create an account (they say they don't, but practically, they do), it's quite pricey to create bots nowaday.<p>They could destroy thousands of bots in a week.<p>They don't.
Twitter is a tool of the US national security state and will do its bidding when told/forced to. The famous publicly acknowledged/bragged about one is when the Obama administration tried to do regime change in Iran in 2009. Jared Cohen has go on the record multiple times bragging on how he got Twitter to follow orders:<p>The Obama administration, while insisting it is not meddling in Iran, yesterday confirmed it had asked Twitter to remain open to help anti-government protesters.<p>The company had planned a temporary shutdown to overhaul its service in the middle of the night on Monday but the US state department put in a request to postpone this.<p>Many protesters have being using Twitter to spread information about rallies and to share news.<p>White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, asked about this at a press conference yesterday, would neither confirm or deny it, saying only that a free press and a means of communication were important.<p>But the state department yesterday confirmed a request was made to Twitter.<p>The New York Times last night identified the author of the request as Jared Cohen, a 27-year-old state department official. Twitter complied with the request, delaying its overhaul until last night.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/17/obama-iran-twitter" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/17/obama-iran-twi...</a><p>-<p>Washington Taps Into a Potent New Force in Diplomacy<p>Yet on Monday afternoon, a 27-year-old State Department official, Jared Cohen, e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.<p>The request, made to a Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is yet another new-media milestone: the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/middleeast/17media.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/middleeast/17media....</a><p><a href="https://archive.md/Pzt5q" rel="nofollow">https://archive.md/Pzt5q</a>
The US military and State Depts don't run their own troll farms? Or twitter just isn't talking about those yet?<p>How about corporate ones? Are we gonna do "sentiment analysis" on employee posts to see if the bosses are leaning on them to tweet about how great the new product is? Why not?
It's surprising to see that they removed more accounts from Mexico, China, Tanzania, Uganda and Venezuela than from Russia.<p>As an aside, why is China here called "People’s Republic of China"? Mexico isn't called the "United Mexican States", Venezuela isn't called the "Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela".
Forgive my cynicism but this isn't even scratching the surface of the problem(s). The narrative of the blog post makes it sound like a biblical win against an intergalactic army but in reality the main problems still persist: While social media giants focus on large networks on misinformation, smaller networks are thriving like never before in history. That is a lot coming from someone born and raised in a country ruled by communism for 45 years(technically more but let's spare the details). Decentralization is beating the giants big time - they never bother to look at what happens in smaller countries or communities. It's not even damage control at this point. Take my country for instance: I steer clear of social media, but it only takes one click and the only thing I see are oceans of conspiracy theories and misinformation - from covid being the work of Bill Gates himself, to vaccines are population control mechanism to destroy the human reproductive system and perform genocide on us, to oxygen masks causing lung burns(yes, a week ago a 27 year old died after refusing an oxygen mask in hospital because according to him oxygen caused lung burns). On one hand that is one of the most worthy candidates for a Darwin award but we are no longer talking about isolated cases. Social media platforms are making issues(like covid for example) magnitudes worse then they actually are. As I've said multiple times before, the hobo standing on a wooden crate on the main square 20 years ago became an intellectual, teacher and leader with one tool only - a cheap second hand smartphone.
In Japan, before the snap elections that happened this year, the government paid a propaganda staff to denigrate the congress members of the main opposition party (CDP) on Twitter.<p>You can search for "Dappi", that was the name of one of these accounts and it gave its name to the scandal.
Am I missing something, or is the PRC dataset the only one they don't disclose the real size and instead are releasing a "representative sample of 2048 accounts"?<p>I wonder how massive that network might have been.
So they removed a lot of <i>"accounts that amplified Chinese Communist Party narratives"</i> I see. How about removing all the nationalist (sorry "patriotic") US accounts? What a sham - or should I say - what a nice hit piece for the US propaganda apparatus.