United States Senate Committee Testimony of Twitter's Acting General Counsel

"Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account. The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag. Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches. As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. These steps were part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas."

Relevant portion based on title. Part of an anti-spam effort.

As a Twitter lover, it's been a real letdown to see them sacrifice objectivity and fairness at the altar of political correctness. The platform is so seriously broken by their attempts to censor things they deem unpleasant. I have tried my best to turn off all of their content filtering features, but they still sometimes censor replies to my own replies. You can sometimes see the actual number of replies to a tweet next to the reply button, but can not actually see them at all.

At the same time, they have not done anything to reduce certain types of spam, such as the repeated reply chains under the President's tweets, which can so easily be identified as spam by the fact that they are unrelated to the parent, and appear in the same order under a number of parent tweets.

It's a total mess.

Added: I went back to find an example of the spam chains to reply to Srslyjosh, but I'm pleasantly surprised that they seem to have finally eliminated them. I withdraw that specific criticism I guess.

I noticed this during that time and reported on my observations [1]. I'm glad to see there is a followup inquiry, even if it's over a year later.

The core issue I had back then still seems unclear. When I noticed the oddity, the #DNCLeak hashtag was being hidden / censored (at 3 tweets / sec), and during the same time the pro-democrat hashtag #RNCinCLE was trending strongly (at 12 tweets / min).

In this document, is twitter saying it was simply their spam detection and prevention efforts that caused the #DNCLeak to be hidden (and not any ulterior or political motives)?

[1] http://scala.sh/twitter-censorship-20160724/

Note that, contrary to what the HN title implies, Twitter doesn't say it specifically targeted those hashtags or hid them entirely. The testimony mentions them as examples of tags that were associated with a significant number of bot/spam tweets.

So Twitters explanation seems to be "Posts related to #PodestaEmails and #DNCLeak appeared to be being generated by automated systems and were therefore handled as spam"

> Before the election, we also detected and took action on activity relating to hashtags that have since been reported as manifestations of efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. For example, our automated spam detection systems helped mitigate the impact of automated Tweets promoting the #PodestaEmails hashtag, which originated with Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of emails from the Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s Gmail account. The core of the hashtag was propagated by Wikileaks, whose account sent out a series of 118 original Tweets containing variants on the hashtag #PodestaEmails referencing the daily installments of the emails released on the Wikileaks website. In the two months preceding the election, around 57,000 users posted approximately 426,000 unique Tweets containing variations of the #PodestaEmails hashtag. Approximately one quarter (25%) of those Tweets received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches. As described in greater detail below, our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. These steps were part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas.

Can an admin/mod or whatever change the title? It's blatantly disingenuous if not out right dishonest.

The consolation is that the internet probably has far less influence on voters than Twitter etc. would have you think.

If they had taken similar action against the provably bot-ridden tags of some of the pro-Hillary hashtags... they would have mentioned it in an effort to appear fair and balanced.

It's a case of "the dog that didn't bark" showing up their actions: Twitter has shown they are biased.