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.
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.
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?
Really? You jump immediately to "sue them!"? Even the submitter calls it "libel" right out of the gate. What the hell is wrong with people anymore? Twitter is under no obligation to link you to anything at all. When sites like Twitter start getting sued every time there's a broken link (or a warning that a link may be to an infected site), they'll just stop parsing links altogether to avoid liability. Enjoy your cut-n-paste web browsing experience from then on.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
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.
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
Just saying potentially doesn't have anything to do with whether it's libel not. What determines if it's libel is if it's malicious defamation which this clearly isn't.
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.
They can link or not link all day but guess what, it's illegal for me to stand outside a restaurant and tell people that they're doing something illegal and harmful inside and that they shouldn't go inside when that isn't actually true. It's the same on the internet.
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.