Twitter accounts run by activists linked to the Occupy movement have been suspended after the social network continued its attempted crackdown on bots and fake accounts. Around 80 activists with a collective following of five million people are thought to have had their accounts suspended.
Organisers and activists say that their Twitter accounts were suspended without an explanation from the social network. Many of the accounts were created in 2011 and 2012 at the height of the Occupy movements.
The mass suspension of accounts linked to the Occupy movement comes as Twitter steps up efforts to clean up its platform. The company has reportedly suspended 1,500 accounts over the past week that were suspected of being run by members of pro-Trump 4chan members masquerading as liberal activists, according to anonymous source speaking to The New York Times.
“Twitter's singular objective is to improve the health of the public conversation," the company said in a statement. "This work includes protecting the integrity of elections and taking robust steps to tackle spam, malicious activity and automation.”
Twitter has been struggling to clean up its platform since 2016, when allegations of bot interference in elections, as well as enabling harassment and abuse of individuals, embroiled the social network in controversy. But Twitter’s attempt to clamp down on disinformation and propaganda is seemingly catching out legitimate accounts too. Members of the Occupy movement claim that Twitter is “banning people for the crime of speaking to each other”.
Its latest crackdown follows on from Facebook announcing last week that it would be taking aggressive action against “inauthentic activity” – including bots and fake accounts – on its network. To date, 559 pages and 221 accounts have been suspended. Pages caught up in the Facebook ban include the Free Thought Project, a free speech page with 3.1 million followers, and End the Drug War, which had 460,000 followers.
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Many of the projects involved were collective media networks – groups of activists and organisers who covered protests and news as citizen journalists. One such group, The Anti-Media project, had its Twitter account suspended on October 11. Earlier that day, its Facebook page, with 2.1m followers, was suspended. Another media collective’s Twitter account, Global Revolution Live, with 55,000 followers, was also suspended at around the same time.
Patti Beers, who has been involved in Anti-Media since 2011, found her personal Twitter account was suspended on the same day, together with 25 others that she managed through the Twitter-owned service Tweetdeck. ”Just before 4pm that day, every Twitter account that I had access to via Tweetdeck was suspended,” she says. At the time she had 30,000 followers. She adds that other people who were involved in the running of the Anti-Media account, such as editor-in-chief Carey Wedler, also had their accounts suspended, even if they weren’t particularly active on Twitter.
Patti Beers says that part of their work, which involves publicising issues that they say the mainstream media won’t cover, requires large-scale social networks. “There is no other platform where I was able to get a reach of up to 3.2 million people, that I had on Twitter,” she adds. “Unless there’s a mass move from Facebook or Twitter to a better platform, I don’t see it getting better.”
The suspension of the Occupy accounts represents a change in how Twitter enforces its terms of service. The coordinated nature of the accounts bore similarities to the techniques used by bots and Russian scammers had been found to do, even if the content of their Tweets were different. During protests or events that would receive a lot of coverage, many of the accounts involved would retweet information from people who were on the ground, or use live streams to cover events. In a blog postupdated at the beginning of this year, Twitter identifies all of these behaviours as markers of automated behaviour. Such behaviour includes coordinated engagement, consistent retweeting of specific accounts and attempts to increase the rate of engagement during times of turmoil (for example, live tweeting from a major protest, or coordinating with other activist networks to do so).
“They [Twitter] use a variety of signals,” explains Bernie Hogan, a senior research fellow on computational propaganda, at the Oxford Internet Institute. “Some of these will be used by good and bad bots. Twitter might be a bit ad hoc in their behaviour, and that is going to aggravate some legitimate accounts.”
“I would expect to hear more news like this,” says Taha Yasseri, a researcher at Oxford Internet Institute. “It is actually very hard to tell a bot account from a human account.”
Similarly, Vladimir Teichberg, a citizen journalist who is part of several such media collectives, said his personal and professional accounts were suspended. He had been using Twitter to spread political messages since 2011, when he had become involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Since then, he has been part of groups like Global Revolution Live, which covers movements like Black Lives Matter.
Screenshots from emails sent to activists by Twitter contain no explanation as to why they were suspended. Dan Feidt, who runs Global Revolution Live, says that the email he received had a blank space where a reason should be provided. “Facebook and Twitter have wiped out the bulk of the independent media accounts that grew up in the post-Occupy era,” he says. A Twitter spokesperson said the company did not comment on individual accounts.
For the activists who have been banned, Twitter’s crackdown on accounts engaging in coordinated behaviour is hugely problematic. Those caught up in the latest round of suspensions say they worked collectively, either to “amplify other accounts” or, as Feidt says about Unicorn Riot, or to raise publicity around a cause.
“It’s hard to tell total reach because we retweet a lot,” says Teichberg. “We had 140,000 impressions per month on our original tweets, but that is probably five to ten per cent of the stuff we put out. 90 per cent of our work is curating and amplifying other accounts.”
This way of using Twitter is central for a network such as Global Revolution Live, which considers amplifying other people’s voices and collective behaviour a part of its ethos. For such accounts this is simply taking a core tenet of offline activism and translating it for digital platforms. For Twitter, that could look an awful lot like the way a network of bots behaves.
While Twitter maintains that it enforces its rules apolitically, experts warn that such a stance is flawed. “We might be able to generate an algorithm that does not have a political view, but depending on the data that we use to train the algorithm and the biases in that data, our algorithm could fall short of being completely objective,” Yasseri says.
But the users behind these suspended accounts believe that the suspension is ideological. “Spamming is a random act,” says Beers. “All of these accounts were about news and politics, so that isn’t spam.” However, she agrees that most of the accounts which she managed would mostly retweet others. “You have a retweet button,” says Teichberg. “It’s not against the terms of service to use it.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
