Protecting Twitter Users

Following the social media theme of this class, I chose a video based on someone who works for Twitter. In the video I watched this evening, Del Harvey, head of Twitter's Trust and Safety Team, explained how multiple different tweets that look like spam could not be removed from their website. Her argument was "What about the .01% of Tweets per month" this describes about 150,000 Tweets a month that have to be shifted through to check if whether or not they are truly spam and how they should act towards these messages. Ms. Harvey uses multiple examples in this TED video such as using explicit language, sending the same message to multiple people, and sending the same link to multiple people.

Explicit language is fairly common in today's social media presence, no matter how high up the corporate ladder you might be. “It’s a sizable fraction of the words we use. On average, one tweet out of 13 tweets will contain at least one cursing word, because of social media, people don’t see each other. They can say things they wouldn’t say in the physical world.” stated Wenbo Wang, the Ph.D researcher at Ohio’s Wright State University. Even though it might seem unprofessional and vulgar most of the time, Del Harvey showed a tweet that was an exception to the rule. I won't quote the exact status of what she showed on my blog due to this blog being family friendly, but the quote was a single word that is a synonym for a female dog.What she didn't show was the picture under the quote. She left it up to the audience for them to question whether or not the tweet was offensive. After a short time, she showed the picture which happened to be a picture of a female dog sitting near a computer. Although quite humorous in this case, this is what her job entails day-by-day.


Posting harmful links to phishing or malware sites, repeatedly posting duplicate tweets, and aggressively following and un-following accounts to attract attention are just a few examples of spam on Twitter. Ms. Harvey shows a couple of examples throughout the presentation to represent some of these tweets. However, she explains why not all of the tweets that look like spam are actually spam. She uses the example of posting a link to multiple people by using the @ symbol.  Normally phishers do this to make you fill out information for them to gather and use for their own personal benefit, but in this case, she states that someone may be sending out a mass tweet to inform people of a video that needs to be heard for human rights activists. She recently tweeted that the TED conference that this video covers improved spam reduction by making people aware of the difference of spam and not spam. Twitter offers an easy to use "report spam" button that every user has.

Although the chart may be outdated, Twitter has been working on spam for a long time.

In conclusion, Ms. Harvey's speech was pretty inspiring due to her changing the way I see what reporting spam truly is. Even though the video may have been less than 10 minutes, it had just enough humor to keep my attention fully and also made me want to research more about her work of analytics at the end of the video. I haven't seen any other video's of her on TED Talks, but I'll be sure to look for them now.



Sources:
https://twitter.com/delbius
https://blog.twitter.com/2010/state-twitter-spam
http://www.ted.com/talks/del_harvey_the_strangeness_of_scale_at_twitter
http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/popular-curse-words-twitter/