Tag Archive for: purge

Twitter “bot” purge causes outcry from trollerati as follower counts fall

A number of “alt-right,” pro-Trump, and self-described conservative social media personalities awoke this morning to find that they had a lot fewer followers on Twitter than they had the night before. The apparent cause was the latest culling by Twitter of accounts that in some way violated the company’s terms of service, a Twitter spokesperson told Ars, including “behaviors that indicate automated activity or violations of our policies around having multiple accounts, or abuse.” The sweep has some on the right accusing Twitter of politically motivated censorship.

“Twitter’s tools are apolitical, and we enforce our rules without political bias,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement emailed to Ars. The accounts were targeted as part of “our ongoing work in safety,” the spokesperson said. “We also take action on any accounts we find that violate our terms of service, including asking account owners to confirm a phone number so we can confirm a human is behind it. That’s why some people may be experiencing suspensions or locks. This is part of our ongoing, comprehensive efforts to make Twitter safer and healthier for everyone.”

In response to the sudden culling of accounts, starting at around 1am Eastern Time today, some aligned with “alt-right” figures such as white supremacist Richard Spencer started the #TwitterLockOut and #TwitterPurge hashtags, and some resurfaced Project Veritas’ accusations that Twitter employees were deliberately censoring “right-leaning” accounts. Spencer himself claimed to have lost over 1,000 followers over a few hours overnight; Janna “Deplorable” Wilkinson, who had her own account suspended in October, claimed to have lost 3,500 followers.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Startup service proxies Web, email to purge malware

Startup Menlo Security is offering a proxy service designed to take the risk out of Web traffic and email by proxying them and delivering just a rendering of the content.

When Isolation Platform is available in a few months it will initially support Web traffic, and later this year will expand to include email and any attachments or links it contains, says the company’s CEO Amir Ben-Efraim.

To enable the service, customers divert their Web traffic to the proxy where any executables are run in isolation and only the presentation layer of the traffic is forwarded to the endpoint itself, so no malicious code on a site reaches the end-user’s machine. Upstream traffic – such as mouse clicks and keystrokes – are executed in an isolated browser also in the proxy.

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Network World Tim Greene