TWITTER SPAM ATTACK FORCES THE 5TH ESTATE TO TAKE DOWN NEWSFEED ~ THE 5TH ESTATE ASIA

Thursday, May 28, 2015

TWITTER SPAM ATTACK FORCES THE 5TH ESTATE TO TAKE DOWN NEWSFEED

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Spam attack by Twitter using porn, religious warfare promoters, cults, bogus charity ripoffs forces The 5th Estate off the feed: In this novel approach, Twitter uses it's own clients to take down an Independent Media newsfeed - and is paid to do it

THE 5TH ESTATE
By Robert S. Finnegan
05/27/2015

Since 2011, The 5th Estate has used it's Twitter newsfeed to disseminate news to an international audience. It was an innovation that was welcomed as it provided Independent Media coverage normally not easily attained in other venues and was immediately picked up by search engines.

In the early hours of 25 May however, we noticed the first "promotional" advertisements popping up on the newsfeed.

As The 5th Estate does not and never has allowed commercial advertising on the bureau other than charity and cross-promotion for the published work of other Independent Media colleagues - pro bono - we were not pleased in the least to see this appearing in the middle of our newsfeed.

Believing at first that this was simply a case of a spammer or two action was taken to remove the offensive ads and we continued to publish. We soon enough ascertained that we were wrong when spam ads began to proliferate exponentially, and soon removing them required going into the root element itself and excising the HTML code.

Not knowing yet that this was actually Twitter making these HTML entries we assumed it was the spammers themselves. The 5th Estate logged over 100 spam complaints with Twitter over the next 48 hours, with no reply.

The attack then escalated with ads from porn sites, Islamic fundamentalist radicals and religious cults piling on to the newsfeed. Readers that were unaware of what was happening not only complained but began to exit the feed. We responded informing them that we were under a major spam attack, still not realising that it was Twitter that was behind it - even as their account "terms and conditions" expressly forbids ads and content of these types. And, Twitter is reaping monetary reward for it.

Following 24 hours of non-stop spam removal and accompanying complaints to Twitter (we have the archived log) we began retaliating against the individual spammers by re-tweeting their ads identifying them a spam generators.

One of these spammers actually contacted The 5th Estate, and identified Twitter as the culprits. The spammer then informed The 5th Estate that his organisation had paid Twitter for the service.

The Twitter spammers from Greedeals https://twitter.com/greedeals:

"… we pay Twitter for this service."

"…it's a Twitter way of services it's not our problem, so stop all this texting about us, or we will mark this as abuse."

A spammer invading our newsfeed and then threatening to report The 5th Estate for abuse. The definition of insanity, which apparently now reigns at Twitter corporate.

After 48 hours, we threw in the towel, the spam kept on rolling in and it was unstoppable.

The 5th Estate then made the decision to close down the newsfeed rather than be forced to allow this egregious violation of not only our usage agreement with Twitter, but having discrediting spam appear and clog our account that we had held since 2011.

Aside from spamming, this incident has ominous implications for Independent Media news bureaus that use Twitter to disseminate the news. This is not the first time The 5th Estate has had a confrontation with Twitter, the last was over our content and our account was blocked for 72 hours before Twitter thought better of it and re-opened it following our negative coverage of them and their anti-free speech tactics.

This time, there will be no quarter. Twitter can expect nothing but negative, investigative exposure publication from The 5th Estate from this day forward.