> Samuel Woolley, an information warfare expert who was director of Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Research Team, questioned the timing of the directives, saying they came after he and associates had repeatedly warned Twitter officials that the existing deletion policy already was undermining their efforts — and those of many other researchers — to determine the extent of Russia’s attempts to manipulate the social media platform.
I'd like to turn this topic around and ask HN: do you like reading articles like this? I am continuously baffled by their poor quality, in more ways than one:
1) the main thrust of the story is confusing. At one point we're discussing Twitter privacy rules, later on the security researches talk about Twitter's policies on deleting content that violates their ToS. Which one is it? It's a fairly important distinction. If Twitter is protecting the privacy of their users(demanding that companies delete tweets that users have themselves deleted), then this is a big non-story. If Twitter is deleting things breaching their ToS, then the researchers may have a point about preserving that information.
2) the accounts are conflicting. The journalist initially writes:
"In June and September of 2016, the company posted updates to its privacy policy and user agreements that reminded firms".
Later on, the journalist presents a statement from a Mr Woolley:
“All social media companies have deletion policies,” Woolley added. “However, when policies are changed during pivotal political moments — and when the company has regularly been warned its platform is the vessel for civic manipulation in similar moments — one is right to wonder, why then?”
This quote does not make sense, since by the journalist's assertion, Twitter did not change their policy. Keep in mind, the journalist did not quote Twitter as saying "we reminded firms", the journalist stated this as if it was fact.
3) the story lacks details. The main "twist" of the story is here:
"But some government and private-sector cybersecurity analysts said the changes were far more significant, and had the effect of prompting data firms to destroy potentially large amounts of information that could be relevant to probes of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election. "
None of the quotes following this illuminate how the changes were more significant, and why they had this effect. The talking head points either repeat Woolley's assertions, or give you conclusions, like this:
“Their implementation and the decision to physically destroy these data raises critical issues on accountability that social-media service providers should be asked to address moving forward,”
(You can only argue this if you have already proven that their changes were "far more significant"!)
Later on, you have a wild assertion based on zero sources:
"For at least four years before the 2016 election, researchers who monitor Twitter had openly criticized Russia for using the platform to meddle in other elections, especially in Ukraine."
This sounds like something important! Too bad there's no source, no follow-up, no examples. If it was actually followed up, it would bolster the argument of the researchers. (it's not like the article doesn't have links to other stories, just not anything relevant...) Speaking of which...
4) the story does not argument well why we should care
The reason why we should care is given in the last paragraphs of the story:
“If certain aspects of content on Twitter reveals that there has been interference in our elections, especially by foreign actors but also by people in our country, the public has a right to know,” Woolley said.
“But before the public has the right to know, I think that congressional investigators, third-party researchers, a lot of other people need to have this information. And this effort to obfuscate information that has been deleted or made private is super problematic.”
Where does this come from? Why does the public have a "right to know"? There's no law behind this(or at least, it's not quoted here); this is a moral plea disguised in the trappings of authoritative language.
The only group from the listed aggrieved parties with an actual "right to know" are congressional investigators; those already have a mechanism to dem...
> Now, if the story was that something was under congressional investigation, and Twitter had been told to preserve documents, but had refused to do so, this might be actually something. But none of that is here.
You saved me a click and a lot of disappointment!
The Great Trump Moral Panic (good phrase) is exhausting too much energy from the public attention. It’s clearly in his interest to maintain the Panic over non-stories, these will always drown out any real stories in tomorrow’s paper.
This is, unfortunately, the state of press + CTR revenue model. It feels like the line between long form journalism and reporting has become so blurred that you end up with these bits that are neither a well-researched opinion/story or editorial nor a well-researched news report. Growing up, every week my mum would buy the weekend copy of The Times, The Guardian, and The Scotsman and read them end to end in the afternoon. That's how she formed the basis of her opinions on current events. These days I don't think people have the attention span for this, and I don't think that the web revenue models lend itself to that anyways. Although I hate lots of words, It's damn shame if you ask me.
deletion policy is a good thing. overall. stop trying to twist it as a bad thing.
prosecution and all law enforcement agencies involved in this are a joke for having missed all this, and still be missing, despite all their multibillion spying programs.
Spring 2016 also saw GDPR (new european data protection regulations) being finalized and people starting to review the consequences of that. When Twitters changes were discussed back then, many at least over here saw them in this context: Twitter preparing themselves and their ecosystem to comply with these rules.
Points to a general principle: as difficult as it can be, if you want to study data from the web later you should be archiving it yourself. You can't trust it or archives not affiliated with you to be available. If you handle it right, you probably can get away with breaking quite a lot of ToS to do so.
Twitter has been urging firms using their data streams to delete data that users have deleted since they implemented deletion.
Want to get cut off from Twitter? Don't delete posts marked as deleted.
This comes back to a previous point I've made: Twitter has a set of corporate morals, and isn't afraid to stick to them, even when there's a cost. I admire that trait.
Ironically, over the last year or so a lot of journalists have taken to auto-deleting all their tweets after a short period to stop people digging their old tweets up. One presumes the author doesn't intend this archiving to apply to those tweets since that practice got almost universal support from other journalists, only to tweets that let journalists drag others through the mud.
I stay completely out of the realm of Twitter and haven't heard of any of this sort of thing short of the little spat with Tomi Lahren. Do you have any more noteworthy examples?
Is there a tool for that? In the current climate that's a really smart idea. Twitter seems to be full of people getting satisfaction from ruining other people's lifes.
13 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 19.4 ms ] threadSo next time get a subpoena?
1) the main thrust of the story is confusing. At one point we're discussing Twitter privacy rules, later on the security researches talk about Twitter's policies on deleting content that violates their ToS. Which one is it? It's a fairly important distinction. If Twitter is protecting the privacy of their users(demanding that companies delete tweets that users have themselves deleted), then this is a big non-story. If Twitter is deleting things breaching their ToS, then the researchers may have a point about preserving that information.
2) the accounts are conflicting. The journalist initially writes:
"In June and September of 2016, the company posted updates to its privacy policy and user agreements that reminded firms".
Later on, the journalist presents a statement from a Mr Woolley:
“All social media companies have deletion policies,” Woolley added. “However, when policies are changed during pivotal political moments — and when the company has regularly been warned its platform is the vessel for civic manipulation in similar moments — one is right to wonder, why then?”
This quote does not make sense, since by the journalist's assertion, Twitter did not change their policy. Keep in mind, the journalist did not quote Twitter as saying "we reminded firms", the journalist stated this as if it was fact.
3) the story lacks details. The main "twist" of the story is here:
"But some government and private-sector cybersecurity analysts said the changes were far more significant, and had the effect of prompting data firms to destroy potentially large amounts of information that could be relevant to probes of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election. "
None of the quotes following this illuminate how the changes were more significant, and why they had this effect. The talking head points either repeat Woolley's assertions, or give you conclusions, like this:
“Their implementation and the decision to physically destroy these data raises critical issues on accountability that social-media service providers should be asked to address moving forward,”
(You can only argue this if you have already proven that their changes were "far more significant"!)
Later on, you have a wild assertion based on zero sources:
"For at least four years before the 2016 election, researchers who monitor Twitter had openly criticized Russia for using the platform to meddle in other elections, especially in Ukraine."
This sounds like something important! Too bad there's no source, no follow-up, no examples. If it was actually followed up, it would bolster the argument of the researchers. (it's not like the article doesn't have links to other stories, just not anything relevant...) Speaking of which...
4) the story does not argument well why we should care
The reason why we should care is given in the last paragraphs of the story:
“If certain aspects of content on Twitter reveals that there has been interference in our elections, especially by foreign actors but also by people in our country, the public has a right to know,” Woolley said.
“But before the public has the right to know, I think that congressional investigators, third-party researchers, a lot of other people need to have this information. And this effort to obfuscate information that has been deleted or made private is super problematic.”
Where does this come from? Why does the public have a "right to know"? There's no law behind this(or at least, it's not quoted here); this is a moral plea disguised in the trappings of authoritative language.
The only group from the listed aggrieved parties with an actual "right to know" are congressional investigators; those already have a mechanism to dem...
You saved me a click and a lot of disappointment!
The Great Trump Moral Panic (good phrase) is exhausting too much energy from the public attention. It’s clearly in his interest to maintain the Panic over non-stories, these will always drown out any real stories in tomorrow’s paper.
prosecution and all law enforcement agencies involved in this are a joke for having missed all this, and still be missing, despite all their multibillion spying programs.
This is only enforceable against newspapers and other organizations that have to publicly show the "deleted" tweets.
people with curl will too.
Points to a general principle: as difficult as it can be, if you want to study data from the web later you should be archiving it yourself. You can't trust it or archives not affiliated with you to be available. If you handle it right, you probably can get away with breaking quite a lot of ToS to do so.
Want to get cut off from Twitter? Don't delete posts marked as deleted.
This comes back to a previous point I've made: Twitter has a set of corporate morals, and isn't afraid to stick to them, even when there's a cost. I admire that trait.