Is Twitter Hiding A Screenshot Of Its Trend And Search Blacklist Tools?
Is Twitter Hiding A
Screenshot Of Its Trend And Search Blacklist Tools?
by Tyler Durden Wed,
07/15/2020 - 22:41
By now, you probably already
know about the massive Twitter hack that has taken place this evening where, in
summary, the following has taken place:
A massive hack which
allegedly has originated at a Twitter employee with access to the user
management panel was, has affected hundreds of billionaires and politicians,
including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Wiz
Khalifa, Apple, Uber, Jeff Bezos, Benjamin Netanyahu
Tweets urged people to send
money to a Bitcoin address; over $113,000 has been sent so far
Twitter has investigated and
appears to have resolved most of the issue after taking down the offending
Tweets and restoring access to the site for those with blue checkmarks, all of
whom were previously shut down from the site
For the full details on the
hack, you can read
our report on it here. But now, an even more sinister subplot is
emerging from the ruins of Twitter's reputation.
Sources that are "close
to or inside" the underground hacking community have leaked a screenshot
of what is allegedly an internal software panel used by Twitter to interact
with user accounts, according to a late
Wednesday night report from Vice.
The tool is said to be used
to help change ownership of popular accounts and, in the case of the hack, was
said to play a role in usurping the high profile accounts involved. Here is a
photo of the panel, with portions redacted by the leaker of the photo to Motherboard.
The interesting thing is that
screenshots of the supposed internal software are being aggressively pursued
and deleted from Twitter by Twitter itself, with the company claiming that they
violate the platform's rules. In addition to being posted to Motherboard and
Twitter, a similar image also appeared on a now deleted
Tweet controlled by "Under the Breach". They have since said
their account has been suspended for 12 hours as a result of them posting it.
Of particular interest are
the buttons labeled "SEARCH BLACKLIST" and "TRENDS
BLACKLIST". Could these be tools actively used by Twitter to censor what
Tweets and topics appear during searches and on its trends page?
In other words, could this be
the holy grail that all those who have accused Twitter over the years of
shadowbanning conservative accounts, have been looking for?
"As per our rules, we're
taking action on any private, personal information shared in Tweets,"
Twitter told Motherboard in response to inquiries about the
screenshot, and its deletion or suspension of any account that posted it.
While we cannot confirm
independently that the screenshot is, in fact, from Twitter's
development/moderator tools, it certainly would open up a whole new can of
worms regarding the hack if it turns out to be.
For example, we
recently just wrote about Twitter's corporate initiative to ditch
"offensive" words like "blacklist". We noted just about 2
weeks ago that Twitter had announced a list of words and phrases that
their engineering team will begin using in place of 'problematic' language
which "does not reflect our values as a company or represent the people we
serve."
Of course, "blacklist"
was on the list of supposedly outgoing terms - but if it's such a terrible
word, why does it appear that Twitter continues to use it internally for the
purposes of potentially identifying searches and trends they may not agree
with?
Another example is
from back in 2018, when Jack Dorsey took the Hill in Washington, D.C. to
address the notion that Twitter could be disproportionately shadowbanning
conservative voices on its site, Dorsey claimed that Twitter
"believed strongly in being impartial", according to Vox:
Pressed again and again to
admit to Twitter showing some type of bias, either systemic or personal, Dorsey
consistently demurred. At one point, he sidestepped giving information, when
challenged, about whether his own personal political leanings are liberal; at
another, he refused to concede that President Trump’s Twitter account might be
in violation of Twitter’s general content policies. “We believe strongly
in being impartial,” Dorsey said, “and we strive to enforce our rules
impartially.”
He also told Congress that
Twitter's algorithms did not have a liberal bias:
In response, Dorsey
repeatedly explained that the algorithm had no inherent political bias and was
simply sorting Twitter content on the basis of numerous behavior signals from
the accounts it was reviewing.
Perhaps the algorithms don't
- but maybe those manually using this alleged interface do?
Regardless, once people are
done asking how this unprecedented hack could have happened in the first place,
we wouldn't be surprised if attention turns to how these moderation tools, if
they truly exist, are being implemented.
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