Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Marks Clean Sites As Harmful, Breaks Links
starglider29a writes "Yesterday, a website I maintain that has a Twitter presence encountered an 'unsafe' warning when clicking on the tweets. 'This link has been flagged as potentially harmful.' After scanning the site and its database, then checking with Google and third-party site scanners, I found no evidence of harm. At noon, The Atlantic posted an article which describes the same issue with the Philadelphia City Paper. 'Perhaps most frustrating of all is that Twitter has not been particularly responsive to the paper's plight.' If the warnings are incorrect, how does Twitter justify this libel?"
"It's our service, and the word 'potentially' covers our asses just fine thank you, deal with it."
People talk about so and so site being safe when Google marks them unsafe, but time and time again it's shown that those sites WERE in fact infected - usually from a third-party ad network.
If we report it every time any website doesn't work right, like Obamacare or Twitter, we'll be here all day constantly reading about bug on random website X.
Software breaks, it's only really newsworthy if it breaks in novel or spectacular ways.
Is it really libel if you say something has been flagged as "potentially" harmful?
Of the "safe web", all content not making "me" money gets blocked.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Yep, sue the shit out of them. Everyone says it's so hard to prove damages. Um, look at the web stats for inbound links from each place and the drop in ad revenue. Those are real numbers that they really will cut you a check for after a very short court case.
Over the years I've noticed a trend with sites and services that offer "safe" lists. Websense, for example, filter software that many companies and governments use, has a tendancy to flag or block sites, not because they are unsafe, but instead, based on people reporting the site, for their own reasons.
A site talking about the situation in Gaza, for example, was flagged through websense and blocked. When I checked from home, the site was safe, no scripts, no tracking, and of course, violated no rules. But, because it wasn't as critical of Gaza (read racist) a group using "megaphone" (google it) had flagged the site with repeated complaints and websense blocked it. I contacted them and had it unblocked.
I've seen various sites flagged through google as "unsafe" that are infact completely safe. It's just a matter of a group of people, with too much time, not agreeing with the content of the site. Usually opinion pieces.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if this was the case here as well. Youtube is horrible for it, I had songs I wrote and recorded flagged various times, because some people from some sites saw that I had a youtube channel and decided to go after me, every video.
Anybody who uses a link-shortening service especially for the purposes of complying with a totally arbitrary character limit, deserves what they get.
Seriously. What is a 'link shortening service' except a way to add another layer of quasi-DNS (except under the control of, probable analytics surveillance of, and subject to any uptime failures, retention limits, etc. of, a single entity) to the process of accessing something on the internet? Even better, since it isn't real DNS, it lacks all of the relatively mature, implementation-agnostic, tools for dealing with DNS and its issues, its behavior can vary nontrivially between providers (so if you aren't handling the shortened link exclusively with a common web browser, it may not work as expected, unlike DNS resolution), and it's a fantastic way to hide phishing and malware from the casual.
You can't really do without one layer of DNS; because remembering IPs is a pain (and tricks like round-robin load balancing are crazy useful); but what kind of sick masochist voluntarily adds additional layers of crippled-semi-DNS?
When I want to move the mouse to an item in one of their menues, the menu just closes.
Maybe somebody at twitter got annoyed at this, tried to complain to the paper, but got no response, at so gave them some of their own medicine?
O, and what's up with the cookie that they try to foist on you first thing? If your site is in such a sorry state, you are really in no position to complain.
If they ban links to something you want to see, you can still access the content. They are censoring stuff (correctly or incorrectly), and if you don't like it, say "fuck you, Twitter" and stop using their service. You'll soon realize they are nothing more than an intermediary to the real content.
I believe these things use lists of hashes of the domains to increase the speed of lookup. It's possible that you have a hash collision with a malware site. They are super rare, but possible. Not sure what you can do about that. It's also possible that there is something that reads as an infected file hosted on your site. A pdf or something that looks like a virus.
I had this same issue with Facebook. They have no contact to a real person ever. Even their marketing folks couldn't contact anyone. Dear Facebook: If you want me to market my page, perhaps not marking it as spam will make me more likely to do it.
Is it libel? Libel is _printed_ defamatory statement. A book, an article in a newspaper or periodical, or even a broadside on bulletin board.
I'm not aware of any laws or court rulings that place electronic media or communications into the same domain as print.
(And _slander_ is the word you're looking for when someone _says_, i.e. speaks, something defamatory.
And no, IANAL.
It's not enough to claim the statements are wrong - by claiming libel, the submitter is stating that Twitter knows the statements are wrong and is deliberately making them anyway. That seems a rather high bar to clear.
Maybe Twitter thinks the sites are dead. After all, you can't libel the dead...
#DeleteChrome
Before you go on a tangent and claim it's only big brother tinfoil hat censorship, let me give a list of reasons to consider it possible. Without answers from Twitter and other sites that block, claiming "whoops" is no more and nor less valid than the subject (censorship). Even with answers, it's not beyond many of these companies to outright lie, so we should be scrutinizing their answers.
1. Money. Google/Twitter may not have pay links on the site and see no revenue from click ads. While this may not be the only cause of a block, it sure could impact how fast they respond to fixing a site blocked.
2. Group Pressure. We have seen this with numerous groups, they have a couple people flooding complaints against a site, broadcast, or print article that they don't like. We have also seen this from groups that are not Religious, so don't just blame those idiots from Westboro Baptist Church.
3. Appeasing Big Brother. The NYT, CNN, and others have had numerous whistle blowers telling you that these companies censor works that the Government does not find favorable. It would be safe to assume that they also censor on their own prior to receiving a stop order from the administration.
4. Big Brother. This comes in so many forms today with our massive and intrusive Government that it can not be discounted. Many of these people share resources, so it's not going to be hard to use this network to block content people don't want out. Yes there big ole maps that shows how all of these massive companies and governments are tied together. Since there are bunches of these covering various categories I'll let you search and look at them all.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying that all 4 of these things happened here, or that even 1 of them happened. I'm claiming that to not consider it possible is rather idiotic given everything know. Anyone that blindly trusts one of these large technical companies or a Government agency today is a fool. The only way to start breaking up the corruption is to question everything, scrutinize everything, and of course report when bad things happen on every available channel in order to avoid some of the blocking.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
If the warnings are incorrect, how does Twitter justify this libel?
Probably the same way you justify your hyperbole: with the basic fact that people are entitled to their own opinions, even if others disagree. Using big dramatic legal sounding words to try to bludgeon others over their opinions is actually harmful to society, in my opinion.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
When a large, unresponsive company leaves an annoying bug in place without any response or explanation and it's impossible to reach their technical support about getting it fixed, often times the best way to get someone at the company to acknowledge it is to report it on tech news.
My company has a project that is funded by NIH, and as part of our project work we are collecting tweet data from the 1% API stream for use in epidemiological research. Up until last week, the python (tweetsream-based) application that was collecting the data was running on an AWS EC2 compute instance. Without any warning or comment from Twitter, we started getting the '401 Unauthorized' error, and our data collection requests were blacklisted.
Twitter's support system seems designed to prevent users from submitting a support ticket. After 4 or 5 tries, I finally managed to get a ticket into their system, but only received robo-responses that did not address the blacklisting issue. Finally, a couple of days latter my colleagues and I were able to determine (empirically) that some or all twitter apps being hosted by AWS were being similarly blacklisted.
My solution was to move the data collection application to a non-AWS server.
I realize that the 1% API sample data is free, but I don't really think that justifies Twitter presenting an impenetrable support system to its user base.
I believe that it's the existence of insecure sites that promotes the creation of immune software. And [TINFOIL MODE ON] that the existence of services that mark sites as harmful allows the vulnerable software to exist and to give a profit.
This happens ALL THE TIME. Not really news. Tons of sites that have never been flagged by Google as harmful show up on Twitter as harmful. They don't just pull Google data as they claim. It's a combination of their own and others information.