WikiLeaks Threatens To Publish Twitter Users' Personal Info (usatoday.com)

WikiLeaks said on Twitter earlier today that it wants to publish the private information of hundreds of thousands of verified Twitter users. The group said an online database would include such sensitive details as family relationships and finances. USA Today reports: "We are thinking of making an online database with all 'verified' twitter accounts [and] their family/job/financial/housing relationships," the WikiLeaks Task Force account tweeted Friday. The account then tweeted: "We are looking for clear discrete (father/shareholding/party membership) variables that can be put into our AI software. Other suggestions?" Wikileaks told journalist Kevin Collier on Twitter that the organization wants to "develop a metric to understand influence networks based on proximity graphs." Twitter bans the use of Twitter data for "surveillance purposes." In a statement, Twitter said: "Posting another person's private and confidential information is a violation of the Twitter rules." Twitter declined to say how many of its users have verified accounts but the Verified Twitter account which follows verified accounts currently follows 237,000. Verified accounts confirm the identity of the person tweeting by displaying a blue check mark. Twitter says it verifies an account when "it is determined to be an account of public interest." Twitter launched the feature in 2009 after celebrities complained about people impersonating them on the social media service.

Comments

Re:Wikileaks

[squiggleslash]

The article is false. Wikileaks does not wish to dox anyone. They wish to create a database of influence. Politician X votes a certain way, you can check and see he was paid off by Corporation Y. Journalist A working for Publication B is owned by Corporation C, which has connections to X, Y, Z, W.

No. The original tweet says nothing about politicians or anything related to sphere's of influence. The tweet, apparently now deleted, read:

We are thinking of making an online database with all "verified" twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships.

This is what the article you're reading is about. After there was outrage, Wikileaks (or specifically https://twitter.com/WLTaskForc...) started back peddling, and then claimed everyone who interpreted the above as being a threat to dox as being liars.

Your spin doesn't match what WLTaskForce actually said, and neither does their spin. They said NOTHING about politicians. The vast majority of "verified" Twitter users aren't political at all, they're mostly actors, comedians, authors, and business people.

This was unambiguously a proposal to create a doxxing database. In an era in which Wikileaks is allied with a President-elect who ran a fascist campaign, that's terrifying.