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Communications Crime Social Networks Your Rights Online

Twitter Adds Tool To Report Tweets To the Police 79

itwbennett writes Twitter is ramping up its efforts to combat harassment with a tool to help users report abusive content to law enforcement. The reports would include the flagged tweet and its URL, the time at which it was sent, the user name and account URL of the person who posted it, as well as a link to Twitter's guidelines on how authorities can request non-public user account information from Twitter. It is left up to the user to forward the report to law enforcement and left up to law enforcement to request the user information from Twitter.
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Twitter Adds Tool To Report Tweets To the Police

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  • by NotDrWho ( 3543773 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @04:02PM (#49287017)

    Click report to police.

    Bitch!

    • Click report to police.

      As described in TFA: The user can only opt to also receive an email containing information about the reported tweet.
      It's up to that user to forward the email to the police.

      From TFS: (for those with even shorter attention spans):

      It is left up to the user to forward the report to law enforcement ...

      • by MrLint ( 519792 )

        Considering that in the instances of 'high profile' individuals, for whom their treats actually got police attention, and when then deemed 'non credible'; there is going to be a vanishingly small percentage of times in which any action is taken by law enforcement for which the reporter will be satisfied.

        What is actually a problem condition is that there is a low SNR and something actually happens to someone, and then police hyper react.

        We can only hope that well-trained (larger?) law enforcement agencies kn

  • This is ridiculous, they'll get flooded with requests, unable to handle them all. Every idiot that's willing to call 911 because the PlayStation Network is down is going to have a field day with this. Is there any accountability for those who use the tool?
    • by rnturn ( 11092 )

      ``Is there any accountability for those who use the tool?''

      Sure. About as much accountability as there is for the people who create applications that allow morons to send unmoderated messages that others wind up finding objectionable, insulting, harrassing, etc. (IANAL but, IMHO, it doesn't much matter that posts can be deleted. Once sent the damage to the target has been done.) At least Twitter posts are identified and can be traced to an individual. Unlike Yik Yak where one can be harrassed anonymously

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Law enforcement already trawl through tweets so this just narrows the funnel for them.

  • by EMG at MU ( 1194965 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @04:25PM (#49287195)
    This is just Twitter covering their ass by providing a way for a user to furnish a "report" to the police that isn't some shitty picture they took on their phone.

    But what can police do? Say you live in Bumfuck Nowhere, USA and you bring this report to your local Sheriff saying InternetUser1234 in SomewhereFarAway, USA is accosting me online. Then what? They get out the bloodhounds to "trace the IP"?

    Most PDs don't have units or personnel equipped or trained to utilize these reports.

    Why doesn't twitter just provide a button that a user can push when they feel relentlessly accosted by internet trolls. It would delete the user's account.
    • by rnturn ( 11092 )

      ``Why doesn't twitter just provide a button that a user can push when they feel relentlessly accosted by internet trolls. It would delete the user's account.''

      Instead of an account being deleted due to the tweet recipient pushing a button, I'd vote for having that button send a message to a dedicated team at Twitter who would decide whether a user account should be terminated. Allowing `end users' to cause accounts to be deleted could be -- and almost certainly would be -- badly abused.

      • I think EMG intended this to mean that the person being harassed could delete their own account if they get tired of the trolls. Because apparently people who are on the receiving end of relentless campaigns of harassment including rape and death threats should be punished for being on the receiving end of such relentless campaigns.
      • Woosh. The button would delete the account of the person clicking it.
        The only thing you need to do in response to trolls is ignore them.

        If you're getting a lot of shit from a lot of "trolls" you may want to stop and think about what you're doing that makes you such a big fat target - odds are you're the troll.

        • Wow, you've taken "blame the victim" to a whole new level. Bravo.
      • Too easily abused by popularity.

        I tweet "Justin Bieber's unphotoshopped pics leaked. Does his crotch bulge look smaller? #Bieber #Photosock." Half an hour later the tweet gets picked up and retweeted in anger by some popular fan. Half an hour after that, fifteen thousand angry beliebers flood Twitter with complaints about inappropriate content and my account gets taken down.

        It's already an issue on youtube for political and religious videos: People making them quite often have to create new accounts after a

  • This seems rather hopeless. Does it go to the police with jurisdiction closest to the IP address the offending tweet came from? Or to the police closest to where the alleged victim resides? What if the intended police department has no cyber-crimes unit?

    And what do you do to prevent people from trolling this system? It seems that someone could really waste a lot of time and resources at large police departments by flagging every tweet with their names or abbreviations in it.
    • This seems rather hopeless. Does it go to the police with jurisdiction closest to the IP address the offending tweet came from? Or to the police closest to where the alleged victim resides?

      From TFS: " It is left up to the user to forward the report to law enforcement ..."

      The user can only opt to *also* receive an email containing information about the reported tweet.

  • Wtf? Where?! (Score:5, Informative)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @04:58PM (#49287469) Journal

    From article.

    > Women have been ruthlessly targeted on Twitter and on other sites like Reddit and 4chan, due to sexism in the video game industry, sometimes referred to as “Gamergate.”

    This makes no freaking sense, How the the hell is the video game industry, reddit and gamergate followers ruthless attacking women on twitter?

    Other than the 3 women who are anti-gamergate, where are the actual victims? Where are this masses of criminals doing this? I keep reading about it, all these evil people doing it, but nobody is ever arrested... Smells like propeganda for some special interests, like some group looking for funding for their businesses... Look war on women going on over here! But please dont investigate, just take our word.

    So, this Zack Miners who wrote the story for IDG, the same IDG that pushes the war on women narative on all its publications without backing up it up with any facts. IDG Tech news = gossip, rumors and attack on evil gamers attacking women. Sheesh.

    • by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @05:52PM (#49287837)
      Here's an interesting vid:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] That is direct video evidence of an anti-GG Sarkeesian supporter threatening physical violence against a pro-GG guy. Everyone knows that if the other side had evidence one tenth as damning, we would never hear the end of it, ever, across dozens (probably hundreds) of sites.

      So it's the same old song for Slashdot's abysmal Gamergate coverage:

      http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... [slashdot.org]

      Try this: link to the /. article that covers the Gamergate scandal without screaming about misogyny and harassment. You can't. And that's because overall, the Slashdot readership doesn't buy the "misogyny and harassment" narrative for one second. The editors quickly discovered that the discussion thread for any article that straightforwardly mentions Gamergate--even if it's one-sided [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org]--couldn't be trusted to go the way the editors demand.

      For a while, they found limited success by posting articles with the template "misogyny, harassment, threats, misogyny, harassment, threats . . . oh btw Gamergate" (i.e. a br But even that's not working anymore, and the editors' credibility on this issue is shot. Permanently.

      Slashdot wants desperately to cover Gamergate, but doesn't want to be honest and up front that it's doing so, and especially that it's taking the pro-corruption side. In the early weeks, they even tried to participate in the blackout, which led to almost every article about gaming at all becoming a Gamergate thread. The editors/ownership knew damn well what they were doing, and it's silly to blame anyone else for the consequences of refusing to cover Gamergate, except with propaganda.

      This is one of those articles that follows that tired template. Make no mistake, it's about Gamergate and the editors damn well know it; they're just too scared to say so.

      • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        Bum 1: The journalists are running scared...
        Bum 2: The people know they are corrupt.

        Courtesy of Deus Ex.

    • by Z80a ( 971949 )

      Well, you need an actual harassment to press the police button in first place.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      There is an on-going FBI investigation, but it takes time. There is a lot of evidence to go through. For example, after Quinn posted IRC logs showing the GamerGaters organizing their trolling and talking openly about it, GG published the full IRC logs: http://puu.sh/boAEC/f072f259b6... [puu.sh] (warning: very large text file)

      It's going to take a long, long time to go through those logs, build up profiles of those users and gather together the relevant sections where they post incriminating material, then tie that up

  • change a tweet into an oink?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Americans have learned to emulate Nazi Germany. Everyone wants to be a member of the Stasi.

We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it. -- Saul Alinsky

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