Welcome To The Circus (We’ve Got Bots & Sockpuppets!)

Yoel Roth is Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity. I can objectively say that he is failing. Miserably, in fact.

As a direct result of Yoel’s inability to effectively do his job, I have received numerous death threats, I have been doxed, and my Twitter account is currently restricted (such that I can only use Twitter to DM with accounts which follow mine):

Twitter has put me on a 7 day timeout.. for doing the work which they refuse to tackle

The reason my account is restricted is because I was mass reported by inauthentic Iranian-focused accounts:

If you believe that @persianhuman is an authentic account.. then I have a bridge to sell you!

Since I initially posted data highlighting their coordinated inauthentic behavior more than 4 months ago, this group has harassed my wife, swarmed, threatened, and even doxed me:

5.5K reflects tweets being counted just once (i.e. retweets of same tweet are excluded from the count). Including retweets the dataset is comprised of ~85K tweets. Be sure to check out the full thread where I link to hundreds of examples of accounts which violate Twitter Rules

Threats, unfortunately, are a regular occurrence given the nature of my work. I have opted to spend the past 1.5 years researching social media manipulation — developing techniques and tools to identify information operations.

In the beginning I would report some of the threats to Twitter; I gave up on that, however, after they dismissed a death threat I received from the XRP Army as not being in “violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behavior:”

Being Silenced (The First Time)

While my account is in this “temporarily limited” state, Twitter has essentially stripped me of having a (public) voice on their platform.

I was similarly silenced by Twitter back in April 2017, when I was no-platformed by Twitter-owned Periscope (yes, I was no-platformed before no-platforming became en vogue).

Twitter didn’t like that I blew the whistle on pedophile networks which are rampant across their live video ecosystem — so they opted to remove me, rather than devoting proper resources to content moderation:

BBC covered this twice (here and here); it was also covered by Slate

#NIACLobbies4Mullahs

Last Saturday (May 25th) the same group of Iranian-focused accounts, which, for years, have engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior, launched a propaganda attack targeting the National Iranian American Council (NIAC):

Source tweet (from NIAC President, Jamal Abdi)

Below is a network graph representation of 6,638 Twitter accounts that tweeted, retweeted, or were mentioned in tweets which include #NIACLobbies4Mullahs (source data: 95,108 tweets between May 25th, 2019 and May 26th, 2019):