HN Explorer

Tell HN: Twillio immediately closes accounts with the word Palestine in them?

233 points by getcrunk ↗ HN
It was reported to me, and I confirmed, and so can you, by making a new account on sendgrid.com with an email such as plaestine@mydomain.com

Instead of a verification or welcome email you immediately get an account closure and violation of tos email.

Irrespective of the politics, such a crude filter is not a good look for Twillio who owns sendgrid.

I did not check if this is the case on Twillio it self.

Responding to the ticket has not revived a response automated or otherwise.

54 comments

[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] thread
actionfromafar
I don't have a good guess on whether this is going to be flagged.
johnnyworker
As I'm writing it got moved to the second page, position #55

Without being flagged, which is the same action but more cowardly.

73 points, 23 minutes ago, 14 comments. Can't even claim it triggered a flame war filter.

It's bad.

edit: it got flagged now, wasn't when I wrote this.

getcrunk
its been unflagged now but its at position 61. which is basically dead. i think it came back at pos 34 (still not front page which it was on) with Tell HN: added to the title, but a minute later went to 61 (third page).
jjkeddo199
Is this actually happening? Palestinians are no longer a people? To the point of being erased from the internet? Really? A human somewhere is moving this lever. Someone is actually trying to erase a whole group of people. Incredible.

If you are reading this: I hope you feel conscious responsibility for what you are doing. You are doing something wrong!

csomar
It is only a 70-80 years since WW II and the Holocaust. There haven't been much change in the dynamics of humans (culture, genetic or nation wise). I think people assume, on a daily basis, that it can't happen again so that they are not distracted by such an outcome. The events happening today shows that such a comeback is not out of the table.

There are no strong safe guards out there. And the people in charge will go for it if it suits their agenda. Polarization is also much easier today. People don't need to read a full book to get propaganda but just watch a few images or a video that triggers the right reaction.

The middle-east seems to be close to the point of no return on a full on scale apocalyptic war. I am looking at oil prices which suggests that all parties are bluffing and hoping that's the case.

giantg2
This whole situation is because of WW2/holocaust. The UN decided to give the Jews a land they could govern so they wouldn't need to worry about government oppression after the holocaust. Of course the member states decided to give away land that was not theirs and had people living there already. It's no surprise conflict has been smoldering ever since.
botanical
Apartheid Israel has Act.IL shills flagging and downvoting everywhere. If you post some critical news of Apartheid Israel's war crimes on /r/worldnews, within a few minutes you get 10s of comments all with the same rhetoric. Same on here it seems; it's crazy.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act.IL

[dead] jessepasley
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IKantRead
This sounds similar to a shockingly large number of linkedin posts I've seen recently. That certainly has transformed in to quite a different "social network" than I remember it being.
karteum
therefore for consistency I assume you expect the same behavior for "taiwan" ?
ahofmann
This is a completely meaningless rationale and has nothing to do with the topic.
carterschonwald
Violating sanctions is a big deal and a risk no business wants to explore. It’s unfortunate but true that most of the automated solutions have a very high false positive rate (sanctions are way more expensive than unhappy customers). When I was at jpmorgan I was told there was literally an entire campus in Florida for double checking every flagged transaction.

Tl;dr it’s expensive to run any sort of zero false negative, low false positive screening process without a lot of dedicated engineering and manpower, and if you’re not a bank you’re gonna do a scheme that’s got a greater false positive rate to keep the costs manageable

sschueller
The sanctions are against Hamas and Hesbola not the Palestinians.
xboxnolifes
Thank god nobody has ever lied about who they are online. Just ban the people who self label as Hamas.
thelock85
Agree with this analysis but it's no where near sufficient to comply with sanctions. Said companies would still need to institute solutions that interrogate the nature of active marketing campaigns to avoid running afoul. This just seems lazy and (perhaps unintentionally) cruel.
[dead] myth_drannon
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getcrunk
well thats the problem. Palestine shouldn't be included in that list! its complicit in erasing the voice of an entire people
[dead] myth_drannon
[flagged]
sgammon
Many of these statements are not verifiable. Even so, the Palestinians did not invade Israel, Hamas did. Palestinians are an entire people, like Coloradans. Hamas is a terrorist organization, like Al Qaeda.

You wouldn't say the people of Afghanistan committed 9/11, they didn't, Al Qaeda committed 9/11 and took shelter in Afghanistan.

Veraticus
What is the government of the Palestinians in Gaza?
sgammon
The Palestinian Authority, purportedly, and Hamas, effectively, in some ways. I am not an expert but I think there is strong consensus that Hamas does not represent regular Palestinian interests. Hamas should be condemned for their actions. But I don't see how regular Palestinian people are to blame.
Veraticus
Since the civil war in 2007, it's just Hamas; the PA governs the West Bank.

Do Americans have some amount of individual culpability for the actions our government takes on our behalf? Even when that government is unpopular or not supported by those individual citizens?

sgammon
> Since the civil war in 2007…

I don’t know why you asked if you know the answer (?)

> Do Americans have some amount of individual culpability…

No

thelock85
Placing moral or ethical judgement on an entire group based on the actions of a few is the most violent form of communication, and the basis for perpetual physical violence.
AnimalMuppet
> Placing moral or ethical judgement on an entire group based on the actions of a few is the most violent form of communication

Ethically wrong? Sure, I can go there.

The most violent form of communication? In light of what Hamas just did, that seems like an absurd statement.

thelock85
I respect what you are saying. I just believe that moral posturing as a pretense for more death of innocents is a compounding effect that is always greater than the initial sin. It would be much more honest just to say “well here comes the boom MFers” (which seems to be the posture of Israeli govt). Now if that same moral posturing was pretense for greater compassion or reconciliation (eg OMG we have come to this, something must change), then that would be ideal. But I think most like OP, especially those affected by the actions of Hamas (I include myself in that camp) would find responding with compassion to be absurd. Yet I believe the long tail of events will reveal these horrible actions to be yet another flashpoint, precisely because the shock of perpetual violence jumps from one tragedy to the next.
AnimalMuppet
Yeah.

As I said in a previous post, if there's ever going to be peace, some of those who have killed in the past are going to have to go unpunished, and some of those who have died in the past are going to have to go unavenged. You're going to have to sell that to at least one side, and probably both. That's the only way out of the cycle of violence.

cholantesh
The unevinced actions of a few at that.
xeckr
This is thought-deleting rhetoric.

None of what you said justifies Twilio in filtering out the word "Palestine".

cheeseomlit
...according to the IDF, surely an impartial source
sschueller
That's crazy. There is absolutely no reason for this. I would understand if it were the word "Hamas" but this is just plain stupid.
quickthrower2
Hamas is also a regular arabic word.

Might be a name too?

simfree
It might also be the constant barrage of Palestine based toll fraud most SIP providers witness. It's very common in telecom to blackhole consistently malicious ASNs that do not handle abuse reports.

Only a handful of networks make up the vast majority of SIP attackers, seems totally reasonable they would block any keywords related to toll fraudsters that previously scammed Twilio clients.

giantg2
I would think they'd use other means like geolocation to restrict use in conflict zones if they were really concerned about abuses of their services.
yieldcrv
probably just a spam filter, just like many people use Twilio, Twilio probably uses the same filter

Instagram's translation service had an issue with this the other day too

good news: this is a great way to get customer support, especially if you sprinkle a little shame and assumption of malice onto it

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nylonstrung
This makes no sense because "Palestine" also refers to the West Bank/Fatah who are not participants in the conflict, and are not sanctioned
quickthrower2
It also makes no sense for social media to pick sides. Federated social media has an advantage here over both centralized and completely decentralised.
giantg2
Doesn't Twillio have encrypted comms? I wouldn't call this social media exactly. It seems Google and others are limiting the type of data shown in the conflict areas.
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PawgerZ
This is disgusting, and those supporting Twillo's actions, equally so.
techlover14159
These type of actions will only lead to an outcome that will be extreme.

Eventually, it will lead to a genocide. Once it is all done, there will be a large body of research into how this happened. The primary purpose of it will be to feel good and pat ourselves on the back with how civilized we are.

Then we in the West will move on and try to find another group that we will like to hate.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

cafard
There are cities named Palestine in the US.