Third Party Consoles, Still At Large

A Series on Misinformation, Disinformation and Subterfuge

This late night interaction between a verified sock account and Elon Musk may be more telling that this isn’t automated. It would take a tremendous amount of scripting to find, identify and remove long-standing accounts that do not appear to be acting in a spammy way, suggesting this was inauthentic.

These accounts were restored promptly.

Elon is himself being very inauthentic, using this as a PR, again saying falsely Twitter did something, changing the level of moderation too high.

Most of the botnets located are indeed found via machine learning, or AI. To do that the programmer has to set parameters for finding them. The most logical means of doing so is near account creation of similarly behaving/tweeting links or hashtags that begin to trend. Other triggers, such as mass influx of followers, particularly of accounts just minted, should cause flags. None of these accounts fit the logical mode, nor does Elon’s “smart” lie.

Other botnets are found by various third parties, such as Remi Barrette’s conspirator0, with the data collected via API scraping, then sent to someone at Twitter Safety capable of executing a mass expulsion of offending accounts on a given list. Remi at some point, presumably during mid-2021 prior to his ban of Rebekah Jones, was given a console capable of removing one account at a time. That is why he or someone on his behalf lied to the press as a fake Twitter spokesperson about having to remove one account at a time when the company itself is capable of removing all in one batch.

The above execution of accounts is suspicious.

What Twitter needs to do is rewrite the code to prevent further console access. They should have an internal spreadsheet that lists every person outside of the company such access was given to, and to go through and revoke each’s access for the time being as they clearly do not have a handle on what is going on.