Twitter Deletes SCOTUSblog Twitter Account Briefly Thinking Its Running Of The Trolls Meant It Was Hacked

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the sarcasm-kills-twitter-accounts dept

We’ve mentioned and linked to the wonderful SCOTUSblog many times in the past, and have even mentioned its annual running of the trolls, in which the site’s Twitter account responds sarcastically to people who think that it is the Supreme Court’s twitter account, rather than a blog of some journalists and lawyers covering the court. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the Supreme Court doesn’t have its own Twitter feed, combined with Twitter’s eagerness to suggest alternate accounts when people are assuming SCOTUS must have a Twitter feed. But, really, a big part of the problem is people tweeting inane things at SCOTUSblog without realizing it’s not SCOTUS.

This year, however, the running of the trolls event went weird… because Twitter briefly deleted the entire SCOTUSblog Twitter account, perhaps thinking that the snarky responses showed the account had been hacked. Yes, it appears that even Twitter the company may have believed that the SCOTUSblog Twitter account was actually supposed to be SCOTUS itself.

Today we had our annual running of the trolls ? wherein we respond to people who direct mostly hateful and sometimes cute things to our @SCOTUSblog account, thinking it is the official Twitter account of the Supreme Court. We?ve done this for several Terms without incident. But this Term, Twitter ? probably through some automated system ? decided that our account had been hacked. So it kicked us out of our account ? thinking we were the hackers ? and then blocked all the tweets, so they have disappeared.

Eventually Twitter realized its mistake and reinstated the account — but once again we see the problems when social media sites try to “police” the content on those sites. They are often not in a position to know what is and what is not an appropriate tweet, or if an account has been hacked. And yet, so many people still seem to think that the platforms themselves have some sort of god-like knowledge powers that allow them to magically kill “bad” accounts while leaving good accounts untouched.

Either way, with the account back in good standing, for now, here’s just a taste of its trolling. Go to @SCOTUSblog for more. It’s too bad the trolling got interrupted though:

Filed Under: hacked, running of the trolls, supreme court, trolling, tweets, twitter accounts
Companies: scotusblog, twitter