Twitter Will Crack Down on Serial Trolls by Tracking Their Phone Number

http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/26/twitter-phone-number-tracking/

by sunilkumarc • 11 years ago

39 48 11 years ago

tom-lord• 11 years ago

It’s not a perfect solution — the troll could abandon the banned account and open a new one without supplying a number

Yeah, that's a slight flaw in this plan, isn't it?...

I guess the only real benefit of this new system is that admins can be more trigger-happy on (temporarily) banning accounts.

acveilleux• 11 years ago

Banning? DOesn't seem like banning.

It's more likely to allow accounts that have lots of flagging to be automatically shunted to an automatable verification step. Accounts that pass verification can then be worth human attention. Accounts that do not attempt verification end up muted.

Seems like a reasonable way to scale human intervention in the face of cheap, broad usage of throwaways by trolls.

thebouv• 11 years ago

Flagging-to-verification-to-muting -- funny enough, probably mostly going to be used by trolls to flag the people they're trolling.

smegel• 11 years ago

It’s not a perfect solution — the troll could abandon the banned account and open a new one without supplying a number

Surely such devious machinations is beyond the capability of mere trolls...

psykovsky2• 11 years ago

No idea how it is in the US, where I live a disposable SIM card costs €2,5 with €5 credit...

gambiting• 11 years ago

In UK any phone provider will happily send you a dozen Sim cards for free if you fill out a form on their website. Most will give you some credit just for activating the number.

pervycreeper• 11 years ago

It's worse than that, it will have no effect on trolls, but privacy conscious users who have an established following will now be at the absolute mercy of report brigaders if they happen to run afoul of the wrong people.

maxerickson• 11 years ago

Is there a lot of evidence that Twitter bans accounts based just on reports from these brigaders?

Drakim• 11 years ago

It’s not a perfect solution — the troll could abandon the banned account and open a new one without supplying a number

Uhmm, I guess they could just scrap this entire plan and ask "Are you a troll?" with a checkbox at the signup page.

breakingcups• 11 years ago

That checkbox goes right next to Google's new "I'm not a robot" CAPTCHA checkbox, doesn't it?

aestetix• 11 years ago

I guess Twitter hasn't ever heard of Google Voice. Or prepaid phone numbers. Or the concept of using a different IP address to register an account.

This isn't even security theatre. This is like some seventh graders cosplaying security for their parents and calling it theatre.

simplicio• 11 years ago

Eh, the idea obviously isn't to make it impossible to troll. Just to make it more trouble than its worth for some meaningful fraction of potential trolls.

arfliw• 11 years ago

Craigslist is pretty effective at stopping those types of evasion. They ban VOIP phone numbers, for instance.

ceejayoz• 11 years ago

I guess Twitter hasn't ever heard of Google Voice. Or prepaid phone numbers.

I've run into services that won't take either. They're in known blocks of numbers.

middleclick• 11 years ago

In countries like India (which is a police state), it is not possible to get a phone/SIM/internet connection without giving your government ID and photograph.

I am not sure how it can work for most countries where you don't need to give any ID and disposable SIM cards are cheap.

bad_user• 11 years ago

disposable SIM cards are cheap

One disposable SIM card is cheap. In Romania it's about $5, coming with initial credit on it as well. But multiply by 1000 and then you're talking about $5000 versus zero, plus the hassle of verifying each of those accounts.

And because it has been a practice to sell cheap calls by VoIP services piggybacking on special offers for PrePay SIM cards, the GSM operators now have protections of their own, so it will be expensive to automate this.

denzil_correa• 11 years ago

Personally, the Twitter policy is good from an Indian perspective. The number of political trolls are countless and one would be literally hounded if you have an alternate opinion.

gabemart• 11 years ago

Comments here seem very negative.

If they do some basic tracking of users between accounts, e.g. based on IP address, cookies or browser fingerprint, they could easily do some kind of probabalistic determination of whether or not a potential new account is a troll's puppet or not, and if it is, ask for a phone number immediately.

Phone verification won't stop 100% of puppeting, but what percentage of potential trolls are willing to go to the hassle/expense of getting a throwaway phone number just to get a new twitter account? 10%? 1%?

Sir_Substance• 11 years ago

I don't want to give my number to twitter, regardless of whether they think I resemble a troll. False positives happen.

Oh, let me guess, if I don't like it I don't have to use it, right? I wish that worked when the police asked for your phone number...

ptaipale• 11 years ago

Wisecracking: if you don't use phone, you don't have a number that you would have to give to them...

pjc50• 11 years ago

I'd be much happier with IP banning or browser fingerprinting than extracting extra personal information. I'd like to find the middle ground that allows banning of harassers without handing everyone participating in a demonstration hashtag (e.g. Tahrir, Turkey, Hong Kong) over to the police.

aaronbasssett• 11 years ago

http://www.burnerapp.com/

mnem• 11 years ago

That doesn't work because you need to give them a mobile number to receive an SMS. It's relatively difficult to get a mobile number without actually buying a phone - some online services do offer virtual mobile numbers, but these blocks tend to be known about and will never receive verification SMS messages from many online services that use SMS for validation.

Source: me, trying to find a damn number to set up multiple dev accounts for testing apps. It's a pain in the arse.

anon4• 11 years ago

This seems ripe for abuse. So I just need to flag someone's account as abusive (and god knows there's always a way to frame something as abusive) a few times and they can never register with that email and/or phone number?

Didn't we already have an article here about a woman who posted a somewhat tasteless joke which cost her her entire career? Would the people that piled on her be considered abusers or not? Would she be considered abusive or not? (In that case, I think the answer is both - her joke was abusive and she suffered abuse in return)

I do like that people at twitter are at least trying to think of something.

arrrg• 11 years ago

The big problem here are the horrific amounts of harassment and abuse on Twitter, not a couple of false positives.

Why do people in these parts always zero in on that right away? So what, some people can’t use Twitter anymore even though they didn’t do anything wrong. If this can still be somewhat effective in reducing abuse it does much more good than harm – and by god, Twitter really has to at least try stuff, like, yesterday.

eropple• 11 years ago

Y'know, I've noticed that too. I have people who don't like me on Twitter. Strangely enough, I don't fear a hissing cabal spam-flagging me off of it. Maybe because I don't do things that people don't like, like send rape threats to an academic because she's going "hey, games are kinda shitty about women, can we talk about this?".

My hunch is that certain folks around here concentrate on the hypothetical false positives (which, frankly, I doubt exist in any significant numbers, but boy can I point at abuse victims on Twitter!), by and large, because the people doing those shitty things look and act more like your average tech nerd than the people actually getting hurt. If you look at the GamerGate jerks, it looks like tech, you see most of the same subgroups represented within it. It's tribal crap writ large.

hnnewguy3• 11 years ago

So what, some people can’t use Twitter anymore even though they didn’t do anything wrong.

How is this outcome any different than telling people who have been abused on Twitter to just stop using the service altogether?

In either case, an innocent party is prevented from using Twitter. How is one "more fair"?

blackbagboys• 11 years ago

Perfectly reasonable disagreements with certain segments of the twitterati are enough to cause them to 'rally the troops' to flag accounts into oblivion. I can't think of any mechanism to halt 'trolling' that won't be abused itself. Twitter is between a rock and a hard place here.

ojegawojahe• 11 years ago

It's really sad how many of the comments in this thread boil down to 'a different problem might occur, so let's never change.'

It's a good thing that real entrepreneurs have abandoned this shithole and it's naysaying attitudes.

jrometty• 11 years ago

Its not just twitter. Trolling is a problem that afflicts a majority of internet services. I commend their attempt to reduce the issue without reducing mass user freedom, even if their proposal isn't a perfect fix.

hobo_mark• 11 years ago

Why is the same man who's behind Square so reluctant to make people (and companies!) pay for "verified" accounts like we do for domains?

uptown• 11 years ago

I can't speak to why he isn't supporting that concept, but it'd likely substantially constrain growth.

Many current and potential users would simply opt not to pay. Others would cut down the number of accounts they maintain. And it would also potentially change the overall demographic of the user-base, even if the charge was nominal.

VeejayRampay• 11 years ago

Bah. Let trolls be trolls, being miserable enough that it drives you to try to make others as miserable as you is punition enough anyway.

metaphorm• 11 years ago

I'm skeptical that this will work. The system seems both easily evaded by trolls and easily abused by "counter-trolls" (for lack of a better term).

hyperpape• 11 years ago

While there's a lot of reason to be dubious that this can scale to deal with all of Twitter's troll problems, bear in mind that there are people who are literally using Twitter to make death threats (I don't think it makes sense to call people who do that "trolls", as they're far worse, but I guess that's a losing battle).

A system designed to catch "I'm gonna rape and kill you" can be a lot dumber and closer to automated than something designed to moderate all comments (I don't think twitter should be moderating comments. I do think they should be trying to address threats).

iLoch• 11 years ago

Isn't this the kind of thing that only works by obscuring the method you use? If you tell the trolls you're going to use their number to track them then they're obviously not going to use their number when they create a new account.

Twitter Will Crack Down on Serial Trolls by Tracking Their Phone Number

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