Please fix the Japanese communists manipulating Twitter hashtags with BOTs
Mr. Elon Musk has successfully completed the acquisition of Twitter. Congratulations and best wishes for the future.
For at least the last two years, Twitter’s community management has been close to the worst. Stealth marketing and ad-fraud have not been addressed, ads have not been targeted, and over 10 billion tweets have been wasted.
As for disinformation, malicious accounts have been left unchecked, and hashtag trolling using BOTs has been particularly egregious, and furthermore, a large number of BOTs handle hashtags in the early morning hours of Japan time, disguising certain claims as if they were popular among Japanese Twitter users. We believe that this is a clear problem.
In particular, BOT vandalism initiated by supporters of the Communist Party and other parties is particularly egregious. Even before the assassination of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, many BOTs were in operation on Twitter to disguise social movements, such as “Shinzo Abe arrested” as if it were a trending topic in Japan.
In the United States, government officials and lawmakers have gathered to accumulate discussions on whether former President Trump’s account should be banned. To what extent should freedom of speech, the foundation of democracy, be recognized? To what extent should it be legally regulated? Should Twitter, as a private company, be able to censor speech without a court or other judicial decision? What is healthy about the U.S. is that the government, lawmakers, and entrepreneurs are all discussing these issues and debating what should be done to ensure social justice.
However, in Japan, there is no community management, BOTs are left alone, trends are trolled, disinformation, post-truth, and fake-news flow into the Japanese-speaking world in large quantities and on social networking sites such as Twitter.
As one of the experts in the field of security, I have also been studying how to counteract disinformation on SNS in the committee meetings and seminars on disinformation. However, neither Twitter nor other platform operators in Japan responded or responded appropriately at the platform study group at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and the problem has been left unaddressed.
At a recent MIC platform study group, Twitter’s legal advisor responded to a question from the government by saying, “Why should we respond to a request from the government that has no legal basis? Despite the public debate in the U.S. over whether or not Twitter should ban Trump over his comments, which have no legal basis, Twitter did not respond properly in Japan, not even at the government study group.
Twitter will also ban accounts with large numbers of false abuse reports without specifying a reason. My previous accounts “@kirik”, “@kirik_game” and “@ichiro_leadoff” were all banned without any specific reason given by Twitter. Not only is this defamation, but it seems unreasonable to me, as a disinformation specialist who is also responsible for investigating governments and companies. It is problematic to be banned even though I have not tweeted anything particularly problematic.
All of these issues are due to the lack of necessary management on the part of users in Japan. I think it was a great decision by Mr. Elon Musk to fire the CEO and legal counsel. On top of that, I would like to see Mr. Musk manage the platform in the same way as he did in the English-speaking world, with proper information distribution in other language areas, and I would also like to see Mr. Musk manage the platform in a way that can respond to requests from the government.
