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

Ironic much?

[Xenographic]

It's funny how they're only up in arms when other people do it. Also the headline doesn't really match the Tweet... If they're verified accounts, people kind of already know who is behind them....

They're totally willing to sell it to businesses (but not the US Government for some odd reason... guess they have to make a new shell company for that).

And nobody seems to care about all those NSA databases Wikileaks exposed.

Or maybe they will be once the NSA answers to Trump? I can only wonder.

Re:Ironic much?

[T.E.D.]

If he behaved this way towards regular people, folks like you might see it differently

Actually, he does. Read your sibling post. He doxxes people who disagree with him on twitter. He doxxes people who donate to politicians he doesn't like. He doxxes government officials when some agency annoys him. For fun, he even doxxed every woman in Turkey back in July. (Met a Turkish babe who wouldn't give you her cell number? Wikileaks has your back, bro!)

So its no real mystery what he wants to do with this information. These days he's basically just trying to run his own personal crowd-sourced KGB.

Re: Wikileaks

[FatdogHaiku]

I will Ha Ha you one better. You know who has two thumbs and a Verified Twitter account?
The President of Ecuador! https://twitter.com/presidencia_ec?lang=en
This could get so interesting I'd have to start watching the news again...

Re:Wikileaks

[hairyfeet]

Perhaps they are trying to show that those that Twitter deems "verified" follow a particular political narrative? After all we've seen Twitter yank verification as well as outright banning those on the right while ignoring blatant violation of their TOS like racist bile and death threats (BLM organizers) as well as celebs telling their followers to attack someone while spewing racist epitaphs (Leslie Jones) and sockpuppeting attacks on users to drum up publicity (Paul Fieg).

So while I'm not sure if handing out personal info is the way to go I've seen enough of Twitter's "Verification" to see its bad and being used for political purposes and if that wasn't bad enough its trivial to get fake accounts verified making the entire thing really pointless.