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According to Ars Technica
A number of "alt-right," pro-Trump, and self-described conservative social media personalities awoke this morning to find that they had a lot fewer followers on Twitter than they had the night before. The apparent cause was the latest culling by Twitter of accounts that in some way violated the company's terms of service, a Twitter spokesperson told Ars, including "behaviors that indicate automated activity or violations of our policies around having multiple accounts, or abuse." The sweep has some on the right accusing Twitter of politically motivated censorship.
"Twitter's tools are apolitical, and we enforce our rules without political bias," a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement emailed to Ars. The accounts were targeted as part of "our ongoing work in safety," the spokesperson said. "We also take action on any accounts we find that violate our terms of service, including asking account owners to confirm a phone number so we can confirm a human is behind it. That's why some people may be experiencing suspensions or locks. This is part of our ongoing, comprehensive efforts to make Twitter safer and healthier for everyone."
And at Vanity Fair:
Renewed fears of censorship have once again led some users to talk about leaving to join Gab, the so-called free-speech social network that cropped up in 2016 as an alternative to Twitter. And Gab couldn't be more pleased. Utsav Sanduja, the company's chief operating officer, told me on Wednesday that the company had seen "a surge of donations, Gab memberships, [and] user sign-ups" since Tuesday night.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday February 22 2018, @08:06PM (2 children)
I don't use twitter, and don't really have any intention to; so excuse my ignorance, but I didn't actually know you *could* even use twitter without a phone number. Didn't the service it start life as an SMS system? (hence the character limit)
Basically, I'm kind of surprised they ever allowed one to join without a phone number... why would they? It was a requirement from the start, so they'd have had to explicity choose to drop it -- and for a business model that mostly just exists to leech your data, generate social graphs, and other such nonsense... I'm actually shocked they'd have chosen to make it optional.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday February 22 2018, @10:12PM (1 child)
Wiki says it started as a website in 2006, and was called the SMS of the internet. There never was a good reason to limit it to SMS length messages other than they envisioned its eventual growth to cellphones, but the twitter release was one year before the iphone was released, (2007) and two years before there were Apps (2008).
Still there was web browser based twitter access well before the iphone. In addition people could tweet to "short codes."
But Twitter was never much of a big thing on SMS, its real popularity came with the first smart phones.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @09:27PM
Some executive with no technical skills likely decreed that "tweets" needed to be capable of being sent out to followers by SMS (envisioning a world where folks could 'follow' a tweeter via SMS while on the go) and so we have the tweet length limit.
You'll likely find a executive with no technical knowledge behind almost any technical choice that seems to make no sense (after excluding those where the choice did make sense 15 years ago at the start, because the world was different then).