Skip navigation

Category Archives: Uncategorized

The other week an article in a local newspaper caught my eye. It was about someone in Perth influencing the Federal Election by using Twitter. Now, I love it when Perth people get some press; I think it’s great when local people get airtime.

However, this article annoyed me for two reasons: firstly, because it suggested that you have more influence on Twitter by having a higher follower count, and secondly because it also seemed to suggest that spamming people is ok.

Spam wall

The article used a very cool Australian web metrics site, BuzzElection, to discover that according to its numbers, a local grandmother had the second most influence on Twitter regarding the upcoming election. Buzz Election uses a very basic algorithm to determine this “influence” score: it multiplies the number of tweets a person sends with the hashtag #ausvotes by their follower count. A basic algorithm like that provides a fun top 100, but not something you’d take seriously.

Using this metric suggests that the more people you have following you, the better you are. Simply not true on Twitter.

What’s worse is that many people use morally questionable tactics to get as many followers as they can, because many people falsely assume that the more followers you have, the more important you are (or really, the more traffic you can drive to certain sites for commercial reasons).

So follower count means nothing, because many of the followers gained using these techniques aren’t really listening to you at all. They’re only there to try and boost their own follow count (and traffic). It’s like filling a small room with narcissistic sales people and giving them all loud speakers. This makes the follow count a useless measure of influence.

(For those who don’t know how people gain massive follow counts, this video gives you an example of how they do it while not caring about their followers in the process: How to Get 8300 Twitter Followers in 3 Weeks – I’ll Show You How)

The second thing that annoyed me about the article was the way this person was using Twitter. By their own admission they were essentially spamming their followers. “I tweeted about that 50 times in one day,” they claimed.

Now I do remember one of the many times they’ve done this, because earlier in the year I blocked this person for spam. They sent an @ message to me, about marine sanctuaries, with a link and asked me to reweet it. At the time I found the request strange because I’ve never expressed an interest in that topic. I had to question why someone would specifically target me with a link, and ask me to RT. So I checked their account to find they’d tweeted the exact same message dozens of times, to dozens of other people in the last hour.

It’s an admirable cause (I guess, but I’ve never really looked into marine sanctuaries), but it’s still spam.

Twitter’s own rules define varieties of spam, including, “If you send large numbers of duplicate @replies.” Or, to quote an e-book I recently stumbled across, “duplicate messages posted too quickly, one after the other, are regarded as spam.”

That means, if you send a large number of the same message to a bunch of people, you’re spamming Twitter!

Is this spamming Twitter?

So, at the time, I reported this person for spam, and it automatically blocked them. But, within months this same person was now being touted as one of Australia’s most influential people on Twitter. Why? Because they racked up a large follower count in only a few months, and then spammed them.

Is that social media? It doesn’t sound social to me.

Now, I’m a realist. I know this is going to go on forever. Where ever there is money to be made, people are going to try and abuse a system to make a fast buck. Just don’t expect us to be quiet about it. Especially when we now have the Internet and the ability to voice our own opinions.

So, I ask that when any of you find someone abusing a system like Twitter, you use the right methods to disarm them. The more of us that take action against the people taking advantage of the rest of us, the less likely it will continue. In Twitter’s case, please report them for spam!

Last month I sent an an open letter to Stephen Conroy about the likely failure of his Internet filter. I received this reply the other day.

You can find a scanned copy of the letter in my Flickr stream: Reply from Senator the Hon Stephen Conroy.

Cybersafety and internet service provider filtering

Thank you for your recent correspondence to the Minister for Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy, Senator the Hon Stephen Conroy, concerning cybersafety and internet service provider (ISP) filtering.

Due to the announcement that there will be a Federal Election on 21 August 2010, the Australian Governrnent is now subject to the caretaker conventions and your correspondence has been forwarded to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy for response regarding factual matters.

Information on the current Governrnent’s cybersafety plan, including the ISP-level filtering policy, can be found on the Department’s website at www.dbcde.gov.aulcybersafetyplan. To view the Minister’s latest media release on ISP filtering please go to www.minister.dbcde.gov.aulmedialmediaJeleases.

As your letter raises policy issues these should be raised with the incoming government following the election.

I trust this information will be of assistance.

Yours sincerely

Lachlann Paterson
Assistant Secretary
Content Programs

Dear Senator

Your proposed Internet filter will not work. It is technically unfeasible.

The filter will cost tax payers millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars and will be ineffective in realising your goals to protect children.

The aim of the filter is to “combat online risks and help parents and educators protect children from inappropriate material.”

    Some of the online risks you’d like to protect children from are:

  • cyber bullying,
  • cyber predators,
  • child pornography,
  • digital reputation,
  • restricted content.

You’re proposing a mandatory ISP based filter to combat only one of these. In fact, it will only combat a small percentage of these due to the massive amount of content, and the complexity in determining and filtering it. You, and the report, have also stated that it will not combat content on instant messaging, peer-to-peer, email, and many other Internet tools.

For these reasons, the filter will only block a very minute percentage of web sites that contain restricted content.

The trial that was recently conducted listed 1000 web sites. A search for the term “child porn” in Google currently shows about 28,000,000 results. In 2004, “there were 372 million pornographic Web pages…100 thousand Web sites offering illegal child pornography.” ^1

The report also states, “One hundred percent accuracy using these commercial lists is unlikely to be achieved as the content on different commercial lists varies and there is a high rate at which new content is created on the internet.”

How can your filter determine what is restricted content with that number of sites, and how can it keep up with the rapid daily increase?

The report states that there are ways to increase the percentage of coverage, however, “stronger circumvention prevention measures can result in greater degradation of internet performance.”

You’ve recently sited Thailand and China as examples of Internet filtering. Firstly, why do they use filtering? To suppress civil liberties and freedoms. Secondly, how do they accomplish the filtering? According to China Central Television (CCTV), up to 2002, the preliminary work of the Golden Shield Project cost US$800 million. ^2 For a Government to suppress civil liberties, this is probably a reasonable cost. However, it is not a reasonable cost to block a very marginal amount of inappropriate websites.

You’ve also recently mentioned that to filter sites such as YouTube for RC content, that it “would not make it [the filter] a practical solution.” Which again highlights that the filter will only work for a very small fraction of restricted content online.

The report also says that a “technically competent user could, if they wished, circumvent the filtering technology.” Many people acknowledge that children are technically competent users of technology. People determined to get RC content in the hands of children are also likely to be technically competent, making the filter ineffective.

In summary, your proposed Internet filter will not realise the Government’s goal to protect children. It is technically inefficient in filtering the millions of websites that you’d need to include. As such it is only possible to filter a very small percentage of the websites currently containing restricted content, and will not keep up with the rapid growth and change. It will also have no effect on the many other online threats to children.

For this reason I would like you to publicly answer these questions:

  • How do you propose the filter will keep up with the rapid increase in restricted content websites?
  • What percentage of restricted content do you expect the filter to stop?
  • How much will the Internet filter cost to implement, and run?
  • Who will bear these costs?
  • What alternatives are there to the mandatory filter?
  • How many sites will be listed in the blocked list?

Yours faithfully
Richard Giles

^1. http://www.icarecoalition.org/stat.asp
(Internet Pornography Statistics – Internet Filter Review, 2004)
^2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People’s_Republic_of_China

* Letter also emailed to the Hon. Senator Stephen Conroy.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.