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posted by on Monday January 09 2017, @07:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-go-first-wikileaks-task-force dept.

WikiLeaks wants to start building a list of verified Twitter users that would include highly sensitive and personal information about their families, their finances and their housing situations.

"We are thinking of making an online database with all 'verified' twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships," WikiLeaks tweeted Friday.

The disclosure organization, run by Julian Assange, says the information would be used for an artificial-intelligence program. But Twitter users immediately fired back, saying WikiLeaks would use the list to take political vengeance against those who criticize it.

Twitter "verifies" certain users, such as world leaders, nonprofit organizations and news outlets, with a blue check mark beside their names so that other users of the service can be confident about the posters' identities. WikiLeaks, which has a verified Twitter account, did not say whether it would subject itself to the scrutiny it was proposing. (It was also unclear whether, under its plan, WikiLeaks would seek to uncover information about the financial lives of Russian President Vladimir Putin or President-elect Donald Trump, both of whom are verified on Twitter.)

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @09:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @09:14PM (#451635)

    Epistomoligists should be having a field day. Their subject is becoming front-page news. When is a fact a fact? Certainly not because it was written up as one in the Washington Post. Why can't we build up trust over the internet? Truth is becoming slippery now that anyone can publish anything. Are there laws against lying? Maybe there should be. After all, lying is a sin.