Anonymous’ online war against ISIS has racked up an impressive list of over 20,000 terrorist social media accounts shut down. It has the terrorist group scrambling to update its various cells on methods to avoid online detection as well. However, Twitter has said that the list of accounts published by Anonymous is less than reliable in identifying ISIS social media activity.
It turns out that distributing an automated script for the public to use to detect Twitter accounts associated with terrorists is not an exact science. Anonymous has been circulating a “Twatter Reporter” bot to just about anyone, and is curating the results into a public list. The accounts on this list are then reported en masse to Twitter for banning.
Twitter says that the content flagged by Anonymous is highly inaccurate, and only a portion of which are directly linked to ISIS. The rest are journalists, academics, and even several accounts that just happened to be Tweeting in Arabic.
“Users flag content for us through our standard reporting channels, we review their reports manually, and take action if the content violates our rules,” a spokesperson told the Daily Dot. “We don’t review anonymous lists posted online, but third party reviews have found them to be wildly inaccurate and full of academics and journalists.”
It is an open secret that ISIS uses social media to draw attention to itself and recruit new members, which is why Anonymous has begun targeting such activity. However, this recent statement from Twitter draws into question the efficiency of the methods employed. Twitter itself has been working to ban and shut down any social media account with links to terrorism, and even employs people fluent in Arabic to vet posts.
That being said, the spokesperson did not comment on whether Anonymous’ activities is a hindrance to its own vetting process.
[Source: The Daily Dot]
