[The Final Dakar]

As facebook and twitter begin to reveal how many fake accounts are manipulating us, I expect this topic will deserve it's own thread. To start, here's a story on what a failure twitter is when Russians outright impersonated the Tennesee GOP.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevincollie...6k#.nnENlve18l

Twitter took 11 months to close a Russian troll account that claimed to speak for the Tennessee Republican Party even after that state's real GOP notified the social media company that the account was a fake.

@TEN_GOP gained enough support from the far right that when it was finally shut down, commentators like Reddit’s pro-Trump r/the_donald forum expressed outrage. Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump internet activist who himself has more than 213,000 Twitter followers, questioned the action when Twitter temporarily suspended the account in July.

The @TEN_GOP account offered a lesson in how inflammatory tweets can be used to gain followers and influence. In contrast, the actual Tennessee GOP’s Twitter account, @tngop, has only 13,400 followers, despite being the Twitter voice of the state party since 2007.

The actual Tennessee Republican Party tried unsuccessfully for months to get Twitter to shut @TEN_GOP down.

“It was in no way affiliated with our office,” Candice Dawkins, the real Tennessee Republican Party's communications director, told BuzzFeed News. “It was very misleading.”

On three separate occasions — Sept. 17, 2016, March 1, 2017, and Aug. 14, 2017 — the Tennessee GOP reported the fake account to Twitter for impersonating it, according to email correspondence that Dawkins shared with BuzzFeed News.

According to screen shots captured by the Internet Archive, the fake account did switch its Twitter profile in February from “I love God, I Love my Country” to one that admitted it wasn’t an official account: “Unofficial Twitter of Tennessee Republicans. Covering breaking news, national politics, foreign policy and more. #MAGA #2A.”

It wasn’t until sometime between Aug. 18 and Aug. 25, 2017, that Twitter closed the account.

A spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the company does not comment on individual accounts.

Yeah guys, gotta protect the privacy of propaganda accounts. I'm sure this has nothing to do with how you guys are turning a blind eye to the problem of fake accounts.

I like twitter, but it seems obvious to me that it's not in their best interest to properly police fake accounts or bots, regardless of whether they're innocuous or not. Their stock would be decimated and ad revenue plunge if it were to come out that a significant chunk of their users weren't real.

For example: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.fe900bc99662

The saga did begin on Sunday, when multiple Twitter users noticed that Moore’s account had nearly doubled its follower count, from slightly more than 26,000 to more than 47,000, in less than a week. At least 1,100 of the new followers had Russian names and Twitter bios, often consisting of pure gibberish such as “Master of Plastic Shackles” and “to be a little girl.”

By early Monday afternoon, 6,000 of the new followers had been purged, with the campaign telling the Advertiser that it had asked Twitter for help.

[subego]

Master of Plastic Shackles is awesome.

[The Final Dakar]

Should be a band name

[Paco500]

I've been meaning to update my profile for years.



I'm still amazed how low my post count is considering I've been here over 17 years and feel as though I've been relatively active. At my current posting rate, I've got another 2 years and 58 days until I reach that 5th star.

Assuming I get it at 5000 posts. I'm not really sure.