ExTwitter Suspends Reporter For ‘Manipulation And Spam’ Hours After Publishing An Article About ‘Manipulation And Spam’ On ExTwitter
from the free-speech-means-only-speech-elon-likes dept
Writer Séamas O’Reilly published his weekly column at the Irish Examiner on Saturday, talking about how spam, scams, and manipulation attempts are flooding the internet. It’s a good article and well worth reading, basically just talking about the proliferation of nonsense online, much of which includes scammers trying to steal money from people. Here’s just a snippet:
This has created what has become known as The Dead Internet; huge swathes of the web comprised entirely of bots, often talking to each other, in a never-ending churn of contentless garbage which may now outnumber the population of actual humans.
Sometimes, the mask slips. If, for example, the language modeller OpenAI is incapable of fulfilling a task, it returns the message ‘sorry, I cannot generate the requested content as it violates OpenAI’s use case policy’.
Doing a search for that term returns tens of thousands of accounts, posts, products, reviews, listings and personal websites — all fake, and growing in number every day.
The piece isn’t really about ExTwitter, but among the many things it mentions is ExTwitter, in noting that in response to an earlier column O’Reilly had written, a bluecheck scammer replied to the column being posted there, pushing people to pay for porn videos:
Sometimes, the effects are merely comical. Last week’s edition of this column was an explainer on the Stormont deadlock, on the eve of its being broken by the DUP.
Now, I will admit I considered this a perfectly lucid and entertaining bit of writing, but an X user was so moved by its analysis that she replied, immediately, with a payment link to videos of her porn.
Such tactics are not new, of course, but they are much more regular than they were even a year ago, having been granted greater license by slack regulation.
To take the above incident as just one example, that scam bot had a blue check mark, meaning that, unlike me, it pays money every month to Elon Musk’s vastly indebted and unprofitable platform, a situation which would greatly disincentive his company taking proactive measures to weed them out.
That’s the entirety of the mention of ExTwitter. But, within a few hours, O’Reilly found that his own account on ExTwitter had been permanently suspended for spam and manipulation.
Very free speech, much absolutism.
Now, again, Elon has every right to remove anyone he wants from his platform for violating the rules, and since it’s his site he gets to both decide the rules and what violates them. I’m not arguing that he’s done anything wrong here.
But it does seem a bit hypocritical of him, does it not? He insists that he took over the site to bring back everyone who was suspended (and has brought back all sorts of nonsense peddlers, and has been fine with all sorts of bigotry). But, someone calls him out, and bam, they’re gone.
Filed Under: elon musk, free speech, manipulation, seamas o'reilly, spam
Companies: irish examiner, twitter, x
Comments on “ExTwitter Suspends Reporter For ‘Manipulation And Spam’ Hours After Publishing An Article About ‘Manipulation And Spam’ On ExTwitter”
Just look at all that speech he's defending into oblivion
Truly there is no braver and more dedicated defender of free speech than Elon “To fear parody or criticism is a sign of weakness” Musk.
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You’re just envious of how awesome Mr. Musk is, dork.
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You either forgot the /s or forgot to take your meds today. The alternative is you’re abysmally stupid.
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TBH, I’m not sure that’s how you spell the word ‘dreadful’. Who’s the dork now, dork?
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Elons bans are driven by Narcissism and intolerance. He knows he is the greatest, and will not tolerate any disagreement.
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Good. Fantastic!
It’s great to see regime propagandists (regardless of the country they base themselves in) being held accountable for their relentless attacks on our freedoms and dignity!
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Can you point out what part of the Irish Examiner article is “Regime Propaganda”, please?
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Don’t play dumb with me!
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Yeah, you’re already a master at doing that.
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Answer the question. As a bonus, also answer “what propaganda purpose is served by the article”
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So.. You support censorship of speech?
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As someone who lives in a country where the media IS a propaganda mouthpiece…
I know how to check how biased news sources are. And the first stop is to Media Bias/Fact Check.
So, that is what the site says…
Would you like to check the site itself?
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Funny, I don’t see Elmo being held accountable for anything.
Ai deep fake porn, and gore? Okay!
Speech that hurts mushs feel feels? Nuke it! Burn it!
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Don’t forget CSAM material! That’s allowed on Twitter if it offends the libs!
(Until every law enforcement authority, including Interpol, starts emailing Elon about that shit on his platform…)
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You Decide
According to additional reporting from MSN, O’Reilly received a deluge of traffic after posting the column, with over 75% of interactions being from bot accounts. In other words, he either bot boosted an article about botting, or else the botting services are giving him a freebie.
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Link to the reporting or it never happened. I’m failing to find this MSN report you cite.
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Decide what? Do you dispute that blue check bots exist?
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I don’t think anyone disputes that they exist.
Possibility 1.) A relatively unknown writer decided to bot boost his social media account to get attention, despite the irony.
Possibility 2.) A bot network is donating its time and resources to both bring attention to a cause contrary to its own existence, and in the hopes of generating a false flag attack.
Also:
https://www.msn.com/en-ie/entertainment/news/irish-journalist-says-xtwitter-suspended-his-account-after-he-posted-article-criticising-the-platform-for-bots/ar-BB1icEul
If doesn’t surprise me that an apparatchik search engine might be hiding results. Consider using free speech alternatives.
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Absolutely nothing in that article supports your conspiracy theories. It quotes the author himself talking about comments on the article by spambots, not “boosting”.
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So it seems you think people should get banned because bots spam their post.
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Or we can go with Possibility 3: A bunch of bots swarmed on an article that effectively SEO’d itself into being a bot-swarm target. That is the simplest and most likely explanation, which means it stands a much better chance of being true than do your baseless assertions.
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The article was ‘hidden’ was because I was searching for an your claims of a traffic spike. Nothing in that article supports claims of an increase in traffic. I would never find it, because I was searching for claims that do not exist. Its really easy to claim its my search engine is actively censoring my results when you lie about what the article said.
Your claim that “According to additional reporting from MSN, O’Reilly received a deluge of traffic after posting the column…” is unsupported. Absent that data, your conclusion that the bot behavior is only explained as an effort to boost O’Reilly falls flat. Any arguement that relies on claims about how much time and energy the people behind the bots are putting into boosting him is without support. He has bots, Musk has bots, anyone with a large follower count has bots interacting with their stuff. You need to evidence the claim that the energy is significant and unusual. That the scope of the bot interactions is different. Something. And to that end your framing of the 75% claim is a lie. It was not a claim that 75% of engagement was bots. It wasn’t reported as a definitive number even. It was a hyperbolic claim intended to indicate the vast majority of his responces were from bots whose clear goal was to scam his followers.
It has long been noted, by Musk himself, that bots swarm big accounts after every post. That it makes the site almost unusable. A common discussion in the here and now is how bots are swarming posts with spam sales links. A reasonable third possibility to those you present is that spam bots use high-visibility accounts like O’Reily and Musk to improve the chances of their fishing expidition. The reason the spam bots were noted at all by MSN was O’reily drew attention to what the bots were actually doing nearly free guerilla advertising of drop shipped junk and scams.
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It’s also hilarious that Koby claimed an article on MSN was being hidden by “apparatchik search engines”. I guess they don’t know what the MS stands for. Or what “apparatchik” means.
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Also, the article itself is from the Irish Independent, but reposted by MSN. You apparently have no idea what MSN’s news-related model is.
If you didn’t even bother mentioning the true/original source, why should anyone blindly look for anything that MSN just happens to repost?
Google gave me https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/irish-journalist-says-xtwitter-suspended-his-account-after-he-posted-article-criticising-the-platform-for-bots/a395074121.html just fine.
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His URL isn’t even working anymore, it just brings you to MSN’s breaking news page..
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You need to up your reading comprehension, dude.
See: Séamas O’Reilly: I criticised ‘free speech absolutist’ Elon Musk’s X. My account was suspended where your 75% figure comes from.
Not something beneficial for O’Reilly, no matter how you spin it. And describing self-interest on the part of the bot runners as “a freebie” is like calling #GamerGate “constructive criticism”.
Charitable explanation: The account was banned by mistake (e.g. all the spam responses to it led to moderators or auto-mods assuming the account was spamming, the account was falsely mass-reported by Musk simps and the moderators didn’t bother to check if there was any truth to the reports).
Cynical explanation: The account was banned on purpose for making Musk’s reign look bad.
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If Elon wants to ban Twitter accounts that make him (and his run as owner of Twitter) look bad, he should start with his own.
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Even the charitable explanation doesn’t do Elon any favors as that suggests that it is trivial to get entire accounts not just suspended but banned by simply targeting them with a bot swarm, which strikes me as an atrociously bad design feature.
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Especially when it’s corroborated by a ton of other user experiences about posting specific words and the botswarm COMES.
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Even more cynical explanation: the Irish Examiner stopped paying for blue check marks for its staff, but the spammer paid for his. Therefore, whoever doesn’t pay for a blue check mark runs the risk if having their account suspended.
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which would account for some strange behavior I’ve noticed on Xitter on the occasion I bother to visit. Every now and then people pipe up and mention their accounts being suspended or something of the sort. Weird happenings demand weird explanations, and I think that’s about right.
Let us hope that Bluesky succeeds wildly and provides a viable alternative to what used to be a useful site known as Twitter.
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ex-Twitter is better than ever.
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Because it has much more child sex abuse material? I know it’s why conservatives love it, they are immoral degenerates
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Son, you know people can see you.
Re: Re: Not the brag you think it is
‘Since the local chapter of the KKK started hanging out at the bar I go to it’s been better than ever!’
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Keep crying about the KKK. As if I don’t love and admire them and the SS (and ACORN).
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Yeah, more porn-bots, more scam-bots, more bots in general, more cruelty, inferior moderation, people (and bots) who pay extra get prioritized in the algorithm, neo-Nazis and other extremely prejudiced people are welcomed with open arms and even boosted by the boss… what a lovely place–if you’re evil and/or a charlatan.
Twitter still has its uses to me, but I find pre-Musk Twitter (which, to be fair, was no paradise) vastly superior.
Elonball!!!
Where the rules are don’t make Space Karen mad.