​Have a verified Twitter account? WikiLeaks might track you

The document-leaking organization proposes a database to track verified users' personal details, like political party, family members and financial ties.

WikiLeaks, the organization that's published US diplomatic communications and purported emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, has proposed tracking personal details of Twitter users with verified identities.

"We are thinking of making an online database with all 'verified' twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships," the WikiLeaks Task Force said on Twitter on Friday. In another tweet it said, "We are looking for clear discrete (father/shareholding/party membership) variables that can be put into our AI software."

In response to a concern that such a move could harm privacy, WikiLeaks responded, "No it is to develop a metric to understand influence networks based on proximity graphs," and proceeded to defend the idea with further tweets. But later in the evening, the original controversial tweet describing the idea was deleted.

Verified accounts sport a blue checkmark to indicate Twitter has checked identification credentials to ensure Twitter users are who they say they are. It's widely used with celebrities, politicians and members of the press, but Twitter has expanded the verification program more widely.

Also on Friday, Twitter's Safety account tweeted that "posting another person's private and confidential information is a violation of the Twitter Rules."

WikiLeaks didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Twitter declined to comment beyond reiterating the Safety account information.

Read More

• Share

Here's a 2017 to-do list for Twitter's next CTO

Plenty of work remains on the table for Twitter's technical teams in the wake of Adam Messinger's departure.

Twitter has been making the news lately for not-so-happy reasons, such as its plummeting stock price and failure--so far--to find an acquirer. The company has also seen a series of top executives leave the company in recent months and the most significant is CTO Adam Messinger, a former Oracle development executive who logged five years at Twitter.

Messinger said in a tweet that he's leaving to "take some time off" and his departure seems amicable enough from the outside. Twitter's VP of engineering, Edward Ho, will assume Messinger's duties and report directly to CEO Jack Dorsey, according to the New York Times.

Messinger had a broader remit at Twitter than the CTO job might suggest. In January, after a previous wave of executive departures, Messinger gained oversight of engineering, consumer product, design and research, user services and Fabric, Twitter's mobile development platform.

Whether Ho is given a long-term shot at the CTO job, or is just keeping the seat warm for an outside candidate remains to be seen. In either case, Twitter's next CTO has plenty to work on in 2017.

"Consistency is my biggest technical complaint," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky. "I use twitter.com, tweetdeck.twitter.com and the twitter mobile apps on Android and iPad, and the features available are different on each! For example, the ability to add an image, then tag people in the image (instead of adding their names in the 140 char) is not consistent."

"I think hashtags need some type of bubble help, where people can expand them to understand what they mean and get more information," Lepofsky adds. "And clearly, the noise-to-value ratio needs work. Twitter needs to become far more personalized, understanding the content I want and the people I want to engage with."

Another plus would be improved analytics that help users better understand which of their tweets have had the most impact and why, Lepofsky says. On the organization front, Twitter could use contact and list management features such as sorting, tagging, filtering and grouping, he adds.

Meanwhile, a recent positive development was the full integration of Twitter's live-video streaming capability, Periscope, into Twitter. Users won't need to install a separate Periscope app any longer, which raises the question of whether that dedicated app will be deprecated. Twitter had kept Periscope separate on purpose after acquiring it, hoping it could become a standalone hit much like Instagram has for Facebook.

In any event, with Periscope baked into the main Twitter application, video usage on the service could skyrocket in 2017, which means scalability--a one-time problem Twitter managed to remedy through extensive re-engineering--could be a concern for its incoming CTO.

Then there's the question of Twitter being acquired and all of the technical challenges and organizational changes associated with it.

It would not be wise for a traditional enterprise software vendor to buy Twitter, Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller argued in a blog post earlier this year:

Not a good move, these vendors need to stay on top of digital data to power marketing, sales and service - but social media usage and related data exhaust are fickle - owning one major data source will not allow these vendors to do what they need to: Cross social network sensing, execution and operation of related business functions.

A more natural fit would be Google given the synergy Twitter would have with its advertising business, while also giving a big boost to Google's social strategy, Mueller noted.

Finally, it might be easier for Twitter to get acquired if it can develop a big new hit feature. Maybe, as mentioned, Periscope will be it, but that's far from a sure thing. Coming up with Twitter's next killer app is probably the most crucial task for the company's go-forward technical and product leadership.

Read More

• Share

Tech Giants Team to Battle Terrorism Online

Facebook has teamed up with Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft to fight the proliferation of terrorist content on the Web. The tech giants will create a shared industry database of hashes for violent terrorist imagery, terrorist recruitment videos, or images they have removed from their services.

They may use these shared hashes to help identify potential terrorist content on their platforms. Hashes to be shared will apply to content that's most likely to violate all the companies' content policies.

"Each one of the companies that is part of this agreement has its own specific definitions, practices and processes in place for governments to make requests to them for user data and to remove content," YouTube explained in policy notes provided to TechNewsWorld by company rep Stephanie Shih. "Any such requests for information will be routed through each company to handle as they normally do per its individual policies and procedures."

No personally identifiable information will be shared. There will be no automated takedowns of terrorism-related content. Each company will retain its own process for dealing with appeals against its removal of content.

The four will apply their own transparency and review practices when responding to any government requests.

Magnitude of the Problem

ISIS, or ISIL, has used the Web to great effect for the purpose of broadcasting its ideology and recruiting fighters, the UN Security Council's Counter-Terrorism Committee said last year, noting that it then had 30,000 fighters, drawn from more than 100 countries.

All four of the tech participants that teamed in the latest initiative already have launched separate efforts to counter terrorist activities online, in some cases through other partnerships.

"Our existing efforts to counter extremism and terrorist content will continue," Facebook said in comments provided to TechNewsWorld by spokesperson Alec Gerlach. "This agreement means that there will be more operational efficiency as we try and stop terrorist content from easily migrating between platforms."

Each Player's Battle

Twitter earlier this year outlined its policy, which includes deactivating accounts linked to terrorism groups, cooperating with law enforcement entities when appropriate, and partnering with organizations working to counter extremist content online.

Facebook earlier this year began offering advertising credits to some users combating terrorism online, and it began collaborating with the U.S. State Department to develop antiterrorist messaging from college students.

YouTube's content policies strictly prohibit terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence, the company said. YouTube terminates any account if it has reason to believe that the account holder is an agent of a foreign terrorist organization.

Google parent company Alphabet this summer partnered with Facebook and Twitter to sponsor three experiments using videos to combat the spread of terrorist propaganda on their sites.

Google think tank Jigsaw this summer launched Redirect, a pilot project that aims to redirect people searching for jihadist information online toward counterterrorism content. Project Redirect is not involved in YouTube's partnership with Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter.

Microsoft this spring outlined its two-pronged approach to the online terrorism problem: addressing the appearance of related content on its services; and partnering with others to tackle the issue more broadly.

Read More

• Share