Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/27/twitter-to-cull-inactive-users.html
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Trump will scream when his follower count drops. Again. Luckily the state actors are competent enough to keep their bot ranches trickle-charged.
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I’d like to know what else is being hidden in this T&C update that they’re soft-pedalling.
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I wish they’d cull users without profile pictures; adding a profile pic seems to be difficult for bots to automate (thus all the egg/silhouette profiles).
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Or: Twitter is erasing anyone who had the temerity to die before 2019.
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Hmm. I’ve been squatting on fuzzyfungus, because it is only right and proper that fuzzyfungus be fuzzyfungus on twitter; but I never actually go on twitter. I can’t decide if it’s worth giving it a bump just to retain it or not…
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Some people would have paid money for that.
I wouldn’t necessarily assume competence on Twitter HQ’s part; but it seems like preserving activity from now inactive accounts(at least activity that is entwined with active accounts in some way; replied to or such) would be necessary to keep the structure of past conversations from becoming even harder to follow, since it will be a mass of replies to things that no longer exist.
Of course, if they do that you run into the problem that a whole bunch of accounts will abruptly shift authorial voice because they’ve switched author, which will bring it’s own variant of incoherence and confusion(and probably several dozen clever exploits for botherds and spammers to exploit that I’m not thinking of).
Maybe they can introduce pseudofeudal honorifics to distinguish rec2ycled accounts from original ones? “@example; third of his name!”
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Soooooooo…let me understand this properly.
If I log into twitter and rant all sorts of hate fueled vile and racist things, my account will remain active.
If I say nothing at all, they will force my account to be shut down.
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Not a twatter user, but if I were it would only be to see other people’s twats. So is twatter now saying it is not permissible to simply lurk and follow? That one MUST make up twats for others to read, if one is to be allowed to use the service?
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You logged in, that’s all they care about.
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No, it’s whether you’ve logged in at all. It’s totally valid to use Twitter as a newsreader and never post anything yourself, but you need to use the site to do that. They’re culling accounts that haven’t logged in or used the service at all for half a year.
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for @agies @anothernewbbaccount also
I get all that…I think maybe my sarcasm was missed around Twitter seemingly allowing hate speech to continue and not banning those accounts; but will ban accounts who don’t actually tweet.
kind of fucked up what they give a damn about and will take action on…or is that just me?
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No - you are far from fucked up. Twatter is completely and utterly fucked up.
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To be fair, they’ve gotten better at taking action on accounts that users report. If you got on there and yelled a bunch of racist BS, and people reported you, you’d get shut down fast.
What they haven’t gotten better at is banning Nazis for being Nazis. You can Nazi all day long on Twitter as long as you’re careful about it and don’t use any racist terms for your blatant hate speech. Somehow they’re good at doing this in Germany, where it’s actually illegal, but claim it’s too hard in America (because if they did auto-ban hate speech, it’d auto-ban most Republicans and our president, and that’s their current bread and butter).
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cull me. have been inactive since 2018. cull me, cull you, cull everyone. shut it down. NOBODY needs twitter. go ahead, fight me. get off it for a year and you will see.
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I actually have a Twitter account, but I can’t recall posting anything on it.
(I checked: Some automated tweets from what was Echo Bazaar - I think getting a twitter thing to sign on there was necessary - and a single retweet of a Matt Taibbi article. Let it all vanish…)
Twitter to cull inactive users
Cull away, thinly veiled threat me thinks…
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No.
You just have to log in.
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Okay, because I want my account dead, not available to some jackass. (It wound up being briefly hijacked anyway, although at least from my view of things I couldn’t see that anything had been done with it.)
