{"id":14856,"date":"2012-04-30T12:56:36","date_gmt":"2012-04-30T17:56:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=14856"},"modified":"2012-04-30T12:56:36","modified_gmt":"2012-04-30T17:56:36","slug":"twitters-red-guard-of-flag-spam-abusers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/04\/30\/twitters-red-guard-of-flag-spam-abusers\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter’s “Red Guard” of flag-spam abusers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some nasty tricks being played by some Twitter users, abusing the report feature that is supposed to help cut down on spam posts to attempt to shut down opinions they find offensive<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Shortly after their video \u201cIf I Wanted America to Fail\u201d went viral, Free Market America found themselves kicked off Twitter, a popular social media resource that allows users to post very short messages. After a few hours of confusion, their account was reinstated.<\/p>\n

This past Sunday, the Twitter account of Chris Loesch, husband of conservative pundit Dana Loesch, was abruptly shut down. After a massive outcry, and the creation of a Twitter topic called \u201c#FreeChrisLoesch\u201d that swiftly became one of the hottest \u201chash tags\u201d on the network, Chris\u2019 account was reactivated\u2026 for a couple of hours. By Monday morning, he was gone again, after his account was restored and removed several more times.<\/p>\n

What did Free Market America and Chris Loesch do to warrant suspension? After all, people like Spike Lee and Roseanne Barr flagrantly, openly, defiantly violated Twitter\u2019s terms of service, and put human lives in jeopardy, by distributing personal information about George Zimmerman, the shooter in the Trayvon Martin case. Their accounts have not been suspended. What violation of Loesch\u2019s compares to using Twitter to target someone for assault by an angry mob — and, for that matter, sending the mob to the wrong address?<\/p>\n

These suspensions were apparently the work of \u201cflag spammers,\u201d digital brown shirt gangs that make coordinated attacks to silence conservative voices by abusing Twitter\u2019s spam flagging feature. Al Gore coined the term \u201cdigital brown shirts\u201d to describe the online squadrons supposedly unleashed to \u201charass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.\u201d Of course, he was talking about President Bush, and there weren\u2019t any actual \u201cdigital brown shirts\u201d at the time, but this is precisely the sort of behavior he was describing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some nasty tricks being played by some Twitter users, abusing the report feature that is supposed to help cut down on spam posts to attempt to shut down opinions they find offensive: Shortly after their video \u201cIf I Wanted America to Fail\u201d went viral, Free Market America found themselves kicked off Twitter, a popular social […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,15],"tags":[459,186,58,310],"class_list":["post-14856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-technology","tag-censorship","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-internet","tag-twitter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3RC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14857,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14856\/revisions\/14857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}