"""
In a statement, Twitter said that as a part of its routine efforts to stop spam and inauthentic behavior, it had inadvertently gone after a number of legitimate Chinese-language accounts.
“These accounts were not mass reported by the Chinese authorities — this was routine action on our part,” the company said in a statement on Twitter. “Sometimes our routine actions catch false positives or we make errors. We apologize.”
Online, many users said they did not believe Twitter’s statement told the whole story.
"""
on a similar note the documentary "The Gate of Heavenly Peace," far the best history of the 1989 Tiananmen protests and mass carnage, is available in two parts on YouTube https://youtu.be/1Gtt2JxmQtg
people need to be reminded that China hasn't changed in the way they treat anyone critical of this regime. and there are far to many China apologists sitting in power in Silicon Valley (at YC Sam Altman is a prominent case)
How does something large scale like this happen? Is it possible to get an account suspended solely by mass reporting of Tweets, or does it require some level of internal access to Twitter?
The former would just mean Twitter needs to tweak their suspension procedures a bit. The latter would be quite worrisome due to the various implications (security breach, internal oversight and approval, rogue employee, etc.).
Most of the accounts were probably registered normally with en email address and a handle, only until Twitter presented the accounts with a 'Please verify the account with a phone number', and then they got flagged and banned.
There used to be a loophole in Twitter where you could register accounts en masse (without phone verification), but they have since clamped down on this and now you have to go through rigorous verification steps to prove you're not some bot or trying to run a propaganda campaign.
But if one is some running bots for a propaganda campaign that's friendly to Twitter investors' interests, one magically doesn't run into those sorts of verification hoops.
They've also restricted my account for no apparent reason a few days ago, and because the account is associated to an older phone number I have no choice but to wait for the mercy of Twitter Support. Makes my lazy ass ponder about the importance of federated solutions such as Mastodon.
You can’t reuse a verification number across usernames; one of my accounts is locked and wants a phone, but the one I put in is “already in use on another account”.
As long as we keep (as a whole) letting a country that ground dissidents to a paste and washed the result down the sewers, drive our collective greed, we're fucked.
Note I'd prefer not to use the term greed above, it's just the most succinct for the situation but it is the reality.
Minus the invasion, we are pre ww2, concentration camps are happening and we are doing business with those practioners.
I and everyone I have an influence on, are refusing to buy Chinese goods, that's the limit of my power (which is fuck all honestly).
I don't think it's racism, but I've seen people argue that since over 90% of China is a single ethnicity, there isn't a difference between refusing to do business with China, and refusing to do business with Chinese people. It seems like mental gymnastics to me, but it often feels like anti-China actions are confused with anti-Chinese actions.
The same thing happens when people who criticise the policies of the Israeli government are called antisemitic. IMHO it's just a bad-faith smear to derail discussion of an issue.
Pretty much as dx87 said. Honestly I know it’s not racism, but it feels so close for some reason and it might just because China is 99% single race and has been invaded and discriminated against so many times. The devil is in the subtleties. Please educate me if you wish.
Ask anybody who refuses to do business with China whether they have any such qualms with doing business with Taiwan or with Chinese-Americans. I would be surprised if any significant percentage would. It’s very clear that most people have an issue with the Chinese government, not the Chinese people.
> I and everyone I have an influence on, are refusing to buy Chinese goods, that's the limit of my power (which is fuck all honestly).
What device did you type this message on? Odds are very high it was assembled in China with a significant portion, if not majority, of Chinese-made components, and the company that sold it to you either has a significant presence in the Chinese market, or wishes it did.
I understand the concern here, but for better or worse, China is where pretty much anything that uses transistors is made, and it's just not practical to boycott everything that passes through there.
(Not to mention that it's not really fair to punish Chinese business-owners for the actions of their government when they have even less accountability over it than we do over ours. Is it fair for people of other countries to not buy from American companies because of our government's absurd incarceration rates?)
It needs to be a collective action by the moral world to make a difference. Due to FPTP voting system, America will never again have a leader with the ability to ask the people to make a sacrifice for moral reasons. We no longer can implement treaties to get others to join collective action, and no other country wants to be or is powerful enough to be world policeman.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/business/twitter-china-ti...
""" In a statement, Twitter said that as a part of its routine efforts to stop spam and inauthentic behavior, it had inadvertently gone after a number of legitimate Chinese-language accounts.
“These accounts were not mass reported by the Chinese authorities — this was routine action on our part,” the company said in a statement on Twitter. “Sometimes our routine actions catch false positives or we make errors. We apologize.”
Online, many users said they did not believe Twitter’s statement told the whole story. """