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?"
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.
There are two sides to that coin. A friend of mine operates a small aviation website that was flagged as infected by Google for over a year and they steadfastly refused to fix the situation even though he got his site certified clean and uninfected by multiple security companies. Google finally relented when he blogged about his experience and it started topping the search results on their own search engine. I suppose they figured that a headline starting with the words "Why I hate Google..." wasn't doing their image any good. His site did not carry ads, it's a pretty basic HTML based site.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
So, I guess you haven't used Twitter.
People "use" Link shortening services on Twitter for two reasons:
1. (The original) Because they only have 140 characters to use, and "Reply to fuzzyfuzzyfungus's ridiculous comment about shortening URLs here: https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4403123&op=Reply&threshold=2&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=45299555" does not actually fit in 140 characters.
2. (The current) Because Twitter doesn't let you post direct links any more. If you type a URL into a Tweet, it'll shorten it for you. Which, annoyingly, often leaves you with chains of redirects if a tweet whose URL you're clicking on was posted using a legacy Twitter feed manager that shortens URLs before adding them.
There is no way to post links without Twitter changing them to t.co/ links underneath at this stage. It's not a matter of people hiding behind link shortening services. It's a forced "feature".
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Maybe the submitter is British. The legal definition in Britain doesn't involve malice, simply that the statement damages the reputation of the plaintiff. In some cases, the statement's truth doesn't even come into it (though often in unexpected ways, I recall one libel case being dismissed because a former politician who'd been accused, unjustly, of rape, was so infamous for being corrupt the judge felt the accusation didn't actually cause any more damage their reputation...)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
But that is NOT what Twitter is saying. Twitter needs to come clean on this and explain what they found. These kinds of problems will NOT be solved by Twitter's coy attitude of not providing appropriate details (a link from the alert to a page that explains what their system found).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars