Open letter to Twitter

 

Dear Twitter,

 

 

You have 10 years now. And we love you because you're a wonderful way to connect people.

But we are concerned. Because something goes wrong for nearly 2 years, a strange illness that makes your feathers turn black. It's called ISIS, it's causing pain and desolation all over the planet, it's changing the minds of many young people into shit. And the virus is inside you.

 

We love you and we'd like to help. Because we believe everyone can do its part to make this world better. That's why we set up 14 months ago our project called Controlling Section @Ctrlsec. We hunt ISIS accounts, extract information relevant for intelligence purpose and expose the accounts so that people could report them to you and get them suspended.

Our sole ambition is to contribute to make an harder life for ISIS, to disrupt their propaganda networks and prevent some youngs to be radicalized. 20 000 people have joined us to say NO to this online terrorism. And we are very thankful to each of them.

 

The problem is huge because the data volume is sickening, because they can reopen new accounts within seconds, because they're adapting their strategies all the time. We are fully aware of that. That's why we prepared ourselves to last for years.

 

During the previous year, all social media affected by ISIS propaganda have undertaken noticeable improvements to fight it : A life span of an ISIS video on Youtube is now less than 1 hour. Justpaste .it added a reporting feature. Archive too. Telegram now shuts down ISIS propaganda channels whereas they were reluctant to do so at first because of their concern about freedom of speech. It seems nearly everybody now switched from talks to actions in order to eradicate this dark plague.

 

Now, when it comes to Twitter, we are questioning. What has actually been done to improve the situation ? How come that this social media is still full of sickening beheading pictures and wanted to kill lists, why are terrorists accounts still up for weeks despite multiple reports ? Why can't twitter suspend automatically these hundreds of accounts that come back within minutes by simply changing the number at the end of their name, why can't twitter set up an automatic suspension based on picture profile ? why can't they detect these ISIS accounts that block more than 80,000 ordinary users to avoid being reported ? Why can't twitter freeze an hashtag when it's flooded by ISIS fans ? Why are accounts still shut down one by one whereas entire networks of followers must be put down in order to really damage their decentralized system ? Everyday that passes, ISIS is mocking louder @jack @twitter and @support. That's heartbreaking.

 

More concerning, for 3 weeks, the accounts of the people involved in the fight against ISIS are merely suspended by Twitter. Yes, you read it right. Thousands of terrorist accounts are still up but Twitter suspends our accounts : hunters, parodics, counter propaganda, even analysts dealing with ISIS are suspended without any reason. More than 60 accounts have been affected since the beginning of the month, some have been suspended , reinstated and suspended again the day after. And unfortunately we can't get any single explanation from twitter

See details here : https://justpaste.it/t8yx

That's the reason why we're writing this open letter, to ask you : what's going on ?

Do you have a lack of workforce to deal with the ISIS problem ? Are they possible infiltrators within your services ? Employees who have been threatened by ISIS ? Technical issues in your algorithms ? Or do you simply don't care ? Or even worse, becoming tolerant with ISIS ?

 

Twitter, if you could set up an open dialog with your users, we are convinced that many misunderstandings could be avoided, and it would contribute to a much better coordination and efficiency to defeat ISIS. We love Twitter, we are legion, we are willing to help. We are offering an helping hand, for free. Please think about it. The ball is in your court now. The world is watching you. And you're currently writing what the history will remind of you.

 

Thanks for your attention     

Controlling Section   

 

 

 

NB : Twitter, please, do a favor to us, change your report function to a single click button for terrorism ?