Twitter and YouTube wouldn’t delete an extremist cleric’s posts (update: gone)

Internet giants have been increasingly willing to take down extremist content, but their previous reluctance is coming back to haunt them. The UK recently convicted radical cleric Anjem Choudary (and co-defendant Mohammed Rahman) of rallying support for ISIS, and court documents have revealed that neither Twitter nor YouTube agreed to take down key content. Twitter hasn’t deleted his account, for example, despite British law enforcement’s claims that it violates Twitter policies on promoting terrorism — even after he was arrested in September 2014. It pulled Rahman’s, but not in sync with an official request.

YouTube has sometimes pulled videos, but not always. It wouldn’t yank one Choudary clip because it was “journalistic” (it was posted at a research institute), while only some of Rahman’s content went down. One of his stayed online under claims that it fostered “religious debate.”

We’ve reached out to both Twitter and YouTube for their take on the situation, although authorities mentioned in the documents that they didn’t have the authority to make either site take the extremist material down. The big question is whether or not the sites would react differently now. Google, Twitter and others have taken a more aggressive stance in fighting pro-terrorist content in recent months, even since the last Twitter takedown request in March 2016. It wouldn’t be surprising if they pulled a lot more of the offending online content in the current climate.

Update: Choudary’s Twitter account has disappeared following news reports. Also, YouTube reiterated its policies, which have it pulling pro-terrorist content unless there’s a “clear news or documentary purpose.” You can read YouTube’s full statement below.

“We have clear policies prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence, and quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users. We also terminate accounts run by terrorist organisations or those that repeatedly violate our policies. We allow videos posted with a clear news or documentary purpose to remain on YouTube, applying warnings and age-restrictions as appropriate.”

Source: The Independent

Kanye West, incest and Twitter’s First Amendment conundrum

NSFW Warning: This story may contain links to and descriptions or images of explicit sexual acts.

On Nov. 11th, 2014, Kim Kardashian’s ass broke the internet. Her iconic posterior, photographed by Jean-Paul Goude, graced the cover of Paper magazine and became an instant meme. Like a pillow-y flesh bomb, Kardashian’s butt exploded into a firestorm of praise and disgust. The New York Times warned of the perils of a massive ass, while social networks and daytime talk shows teemed with hot takes about the young mother’s butt.

In the wake of Kim’s ass-plosion, a strange revelation emerged about millennial online behavior.

Kardashian supporter Lorde responded to the image on Twitter with a simple “Mom,” causing gossip hounds to speculate that she was questioning Kim’s parenting skills. Lorde responded as follows:

“Omg haha ok so. time to explain this. i retweeted kim’s amazing cover and wrote ‘MOM’, which among the youthz is a compliment; it basically jokingly means “adopt me/be my second mom/i think of you as a mother figure you are so epic”

An article by Kristin Harris for BuzzFeed further demystified the phenomenon, saying that the familial term of endearment was widely used by young fans to show appreciation for celebrity role models who “give them life.” Where there’s a “Mom” there’s often a “Dad,” and, naturally the internet has chosen Kardashian’s husband, Kanye West, as its adopted father.

But a cursory look at West’s Twitter timeline shows playing house isn’t always that innocent. For the internet’s #1 Dad, things often take a turn for the incestuous. The seemingly benign “Dad” has morphed into “Daddy,” which has given way to the sexual (fuck me, Dad) and masochistic (fuck me up, Dad). These cries for paternal affection and their various permutations are amplified sometimes hundreds of times over in the forms of likes and RTs.

On July 11th, West tweeted a picture of his wife on the cover of Forbes with the caption “I am very proud of my wife for her Forbes cover story.” That otherwise innocent post pulled in at least 10-plus replies referring to Kanye as “Dad” or “Daddy,” one “Papa love me,” a “Fist me daddy,” a handful of uncensored slides from Kardashian’s sex tape and at least one person who found this whole “daddy” thing a little perplexing. Whether it’s a post about a new pair of Yeezys or Tidal’s beef with Apple, no tweet is safe from the daddy chasers.

@kanyewest fist me daddy

— Nicky G (@nickgobora) July 12, 2016

@kanyewest why is it that only weird white kids call you Dad?

— NicK HouIE (@BasicPatterns) July 12, 2016

Yes, a small but noticeable group of Twitter users are using the social-media platform to express their desire for a celebrity father figure, one who will use them and abuse them. The phenomenon isn’t isolated to Kanye, either. Former One Direction-er Zayn Malik, Justin Bieber and a host of other childless celebrities have inspired the same sort of incestuous outbursts. In short, Twitter has daddy issues.

Twitter’s hopeful sugar babies aren’t bots as you might expect. They’re real people, superfans, meme addicts, professional trolls. Their timelines are packed with sometimes culturally insensitive memes, pics of their favorite rappers, the occasional dick pick or ass shot and retweets upon retweets. They are the same millennials who turned one boy’s white Vans into a cultural phenomenon.

This public display of familial lust is so much more than a simple Twitter meme, though. It’s a perfect representation of the social network’s weird relationship with First Amendment freedoms.

On the one hand, Daddy Issues Twitter represents the best of the social network’s approach to First Amendment protection, with its seemingly harmless, but no less sexually explicit fanfare. On the other, it’s a mild reminder of the harassment brought on by upholding the principles of free speech. Given the digital equivalent of catcalling your best friend’s dad isn’t exactly the sort of harassment that’s landed Twitter in hot water, but unwanted sexual advances are unwanted sexual advances.

As in the real world, freedom of speech on Twitter means taking the good with the bad. The same principles that allow users to tweet their most bizarre incest fantasies are the same ones that have led to wide-scale, unchecked harassment.

Charlie Warzel’s recent piece on Twitter’s harassment problem posited that the company’s dedication to free speech at all costs has turned it into an often-dangerous place for minorities. It’s also made it the home of frank depictions and discussions of sex. While Instagram and Facebook openly censor certain words, subjects and images, Twitter’s laissez-faire approach to policing expression has made it the anything-goes social network.

While Instagram and its parent company, Facebook, explicitly forbid nudity and sexually explicit content, Twitter prohibits “pornographic or excessively violent media in your profile image or header image” as well as “intimate photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject’s consent.” It also allows users to mark their content as “sensitive media,” requiring other users to consent before seeing those posts.

The combination of lax standards and lax moderation has allowed pornography to proliferate, unchecked. Daddy Issues Twitter users also occasionally post nude selfies to show support for their fantasy father figures. In researching this piece, I repeatedly had to shut my laptop to avoid my officemates getting an eyeful of dick. I cherish moments like these because they remind me that Twitter is at its best a forum for free expression, a home for uncensored celebrity nudes, a haven for the sexually deviant.

Despite warnings of a great “porn purge,” Twitter continues to be an open, though often hostile, forum for porn stars, escorts, exhibitionists, free thinkers and, of course, millennials with daddy issues who dare to bare it all in a public forum.

In the wake of high-profile harassment cases like that of Leslie Jones and Anita Saarkisean, Twitter finds itself in a peculiar position. How does it protect its users from abuse, hate speech, even death threats, while upholding its reputation as a champion of free speech and, thus, frank sexual expression? One man’s quest for a father figure may be another man’s sexual harassment suit in the making. A seemingly harmless dick pic can, through another’s eyes, look like a sign of sexual aggression.

Where do you draw the line when it comes to censorship? In response to Warzel’s BuzzFeed article, Twitter said: “We are going to continue our work on making Twitter a safer place. There is a lot of work to do but please know we are committed, focused and will have updates to share soon.”

As that work gets underway, Twitter will have to make hard decisions about complex issues surrounding speech and expression. The Wild West days of explicit content may soon come to an end as a result, but all is not lost for the fantasy-father fuckers of Daddy Issues Twitter. I hear Tumblr has a booming incest fanfic community.

Twitter’s first promoted stickers come from Pepsi

You knew it was just a matter of time before Twitter’s stickers became advertising vehicles. The social network has just introduced promoted stickers, which help brands get their message out through the same searchable ‘visual hashtags’ that you might already be slapping on your photos. Pepsi is the first to embrace the concept, and it’ll offer 50 of the emoji you’ve seen on bottles and cans (see above) as stickers across 10 regions.

It’s hard to say how well this will work. Are you really going to use Pepsi’s take on a smiley if a less corporate version already exists? Stranger things have happened, however — it’s easy to find people who cheerlead for brands on Twitter without prompting. And when Twitter is still losing money, anything that attracts big ad deals is bound to be worth the company’s attention.

Via: Ad Age

Source: Twitter Blog

Twitter Looking to Launch Apple TV App for NFL Live Streaming

In a piece covering Twitter’s successful effort to win live streaming rights for Thursday night National Football League games this season, The New York Times reports that Twitter is in discussions with Apple to launch a Twitter app for the Apple TV that would let Twitter’s users watch the NFL games on Apple’s set-top box.

Twitter has directed [Chief Financial Officer] Mr. [Anthony] Noto, a former Goldman Sachs banker with deep ties to the sports media industry, to lead the charge on live streaming and has assigned an engineering team to create its streaming video player. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, considers streaming a critical component of the company’s focus on “live” experiences, along with Periscope, its app that allows smartphone users to live-stream video.

To bolster the effort, Twitter is in talks with Apple to bring the Twitter app to Apple TV, which would potentially let millions of Apple TV users watch the streaming N.F.L. games, according to the two people briefed on the discussions.

Beyond the NFL, Twitter continues to strike deals for other live streaming content, and while the company’s strategy for live streaming is not yet “fully formed,” Twitter is considering how to bring that content users either in the main timeline or in the Moments tab of the current app for various platforms.

The NFL had solicited a number of companies, including Apple, to gauge interest in streaming rights for Thursday Night Football, but Apple ultimately declined to submit a bid.

Twitter’s first Thursday Night Football live stream will take place on September 15 when the New York Jets visit the Buffalo Bills.

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BuzzFeed: Twitter secretly censored tweets during Obama Q&A

As part of a larger piece examining Twitter and its widescale user harassment problem, BuzzFeed News has reported that tweets were secretly filtered out and censored for President Obama in 2015. Ahead of a “town hall” question and answer session, Dick Costolo — then Twitter CEO — reportedly ordered staff to develop an algorithm that would strip out abusive language directed at the President. It was perfected, BuzzFeed claims, after analysing “thousands” of vulgar tweets. Citing anonymous sources, the site says a media partnerships team also manually censored tweets, due to a belief that the algorithm wouldn’t be up to scratch.

The decision to filter and censor #askPOTUS tweets would, if true, run counter to Twitter’s public position on free speech. The company is, for the most part, a vocal supporter of freedom of expression — arguably to a fault, as a growing numbers of users call on the company to take a stronger stance on harassment. (Twitter has admitted it needs to do more.) According to BuzzFeed News, what happened during Obama’s town hall was kept secret from “senior company employees,” as Costolo knew how they would react to the idea. Notably, Costolo stepped down from his position two months later, paving the way for Jack Dorsey’s return.

BuzzFeed says these actions are but one example of the company’s scattershot approach to harassment. On the one hand, Twitter is known as a place where users can speak publicly and honestly. (Similar to Reddit.) On the other, those freedoms have attracted trolls, who know they can write terrible tweets and tag a user’s handle, guaranteeing their attention. (Until they’re muted or blocked, that is.) Some of its biggest and most influential users — the people Twitter needs to grow and attract new users — have been driven off the platform due to vile comments. BuzzFeed’s reporting describes a divided company unsure of where to draw the line.

The decision to secretly filter the tweets visible to President Obama is, therefore, an intriguing one. The algorithm was implemented temporarily — perhaps for no more than a day — to ensure the Q&A session went smoothly. Anonymous sources have also told BuzzFeed News that the same algorithm was implemented during a Twitter debate with Caitlyn Jenner. One former employee described it as a “double standard,” protecting celebrities but leaving the average user to fend for themselves.

We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment.

Source: BuzzFeed News

Judge tosses lawsuit filed against Twitter over ISIS activity

A district judge has tossed out a lawsuit accusing Twitter of playing a role in the terrorist-related deaths of two Americans by allowing ISIS activity on the website. The class-action lawsuit names the widows of Lloyd “Cark” Fields Jr. and James Damon Creach as plaintiffs. Fields Jr. and Creach were both American contractors who were shot to death in a shooting spree in Jordan last year. According to AP and The Wall Street Journal, the plaintiffs failed to convince Judge William H. Orrick from San Francisco that Twitter “knowingly provide[d] material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.”

“As horrific as these deaths were,” he wrote, “Twitter cannot be treated as a publisher or speaker of Isis’ hateful rhetoric and is not liable under the facts alleged.” He explained that under the Communications Decency Act, online content providers like social networks cannot be held liable for tweets, status updates or anything else published by a third party.

While there’s undoubtedly quite a lot of Twitter accounts disseminating pro-ISIS propaganda, the company has been trying to fight them off. An intelligence report said it routinely deletes accounts related to the terrorist organization faster than ISIS can make them. The White House is also a fan, announcing that the group’s Twitter activity dropped 45 percent in the past two years.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, AP

Researcher-created Twitter bot phishes two out of three users

Phishing, the malevolent hacker technique of getting hapless folks to click malevolent links, just got a powerful new weapon. Black Hat researchers have created a Twitter bot that reads your tweets and sends you a message catered to your interests — along with a shortened URL leading to hacktown.

Baltimore security firm ZeroFox made the SNAP_R bot as a proof-of-concept for the next generation of phishing techniques, explaining its methods in a paper released at the recent Black Hat security conference. It uses machine learning to churn through a victim’s tweets and those of their followers, then sends a dynamic message relevant to their interests. It uses clustering to identify high-value targets based on social engagement, like followers and retweets, and measures the bot’s success by tracking clickthrough rates. In summary, the researchers claim it to be “the world’s first automated end ­to ­end spear phishing campaign generator for Twitter.”

The ZeroFox team created SNAP_R as an education and security assessment tool: like many firms, they are often hired to attack clients using cutting-edge methods that real hackers would use. Machine learning is often used defensively, so this method is one of the first to turn it around to target victims in the “spear” phishing school of anti-security.

Since links in tweets are automatically shortened, users largely aren’t able to sniff out shifty URL destinations, so spotting poor grammar or irrelevant content is the quickest way to suss out malevolent intent. Catering messages is a clever way to keep from arousing victim suspicions and ultimately getting them to click on links they would be too cautious to otherwise. Britain’s GCHQ intelligence agency exploited this technique when it used its own innocuous URL shortener to track activists and incite pro-revolutionary messages during the Arab Spring and Iranian uprisings. That ZeroFox tricked an unbelievable two-thirds of victims into clicking links, far higher than the five to 15 percent success rate for normal phishing methods, is evidence of a serious vulnerability in social network users’ security behaviors.

Source: The Register