I Was Targeted By Twitter’s Trust & Safety Lead, Ella Irwin

How pushing for accountability & transparency resulted in the suspension of my Twitter account (again)

** The Streisand effect is very powerful, hence please do me a huge favor and share this post to Twitter **

Background

For years, I have publicly documented a wide-ranging set of examples illustrating how Twitter does a horrible job enforcing their own rules (specific to platform manipulation and spam). Below are a few examples:

1. Iranian-American Female Journalists Targeted Online Via Coordinated Campaigns: A closer look into a college professor/Harvard law grad driving the attacks https://medium.com/@geoffgolberg/iranian-american-female-journalists-targeted-online-via-coordinated-campaigns-9e685c24030c
2. I Made A Bet With Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz: Dissecting a key (Twitter) account from the XRP Army https://geoffgolberg.medium.com/i-made-a-bet-with-ripples-cto-david-schwartz-1536b92a22fd
3. K-pop Army Battle Royale: Billboard Music Awards’ vote process is being manipulated by inauthentic accounts, and here’s why it matters https://geoffgolberg.medium.com/k-pop-army-battle-royale-1774ccda4c55
4. Jack Dorsey Is In Bed With Extremists: Twitter’s CEO has touted the anti-Semitic GOP political operative behind 2020’s “Stop The Steal” protests https://geoffgolberg.medium.com/jack-dorsey-is-in-bed-with-extremists-27abbf168ae62
5. State-Sponsored Twitter Accounts Pushing For War With Iran: How Twitter remains complicit in allowing the U.S. Department of State to finance propaganda https://geoffgolberg.medium.com/state-sponsored-twitter-accounts-pushing-for-war-with-iran-732d3482b847

The last post linked to above (“State-Sponsored Twitter Accounts…”) was published in October 2019, and focuses on a little known U.S government agency, the Global Engagement Center (GEC).

More recently, Elon Musk, via the Twitter Files has been highlighting the corruption of the GEC, which involves using taxpayer dollars to target U.S. citizens with psychological operations & abuse:

Twitter, a U.S. based company, continues to give preferential treatment to certain governments (namely, the U.S. and U.S. allies), allowing them to engage in platform manipulation that even includes the doxing of U.S. citizens, without facing any repercussions (e.g. an account linked to the intelligence apparatus tweeted my home address & remains active on Twitter despite numerous violations of Twitter Rules over the years https://geoffgolberg.medium.com/when-big-tech-is-in-bed-with-government-e3a11c903ef9)

Indeed, as Elon mentions, this level of coordination between Big Tech & Big Government is very clearly “a threat to our democracy” — thankfully, Elon intends on exposing more about the GEC in March, at least according to a tweet from him that has since been deleted.

Mass Reporting

My Twitter account was unjustly suspended for the first time in July 2019. This was the result of frequently being mass reported by bad actors that were upset I was using my account to highlight their nefarious activity.

My account was reinstated several years later, when I (randomly) received an email from Twitter Support on January 31st, 2023, stating “After further review, we have unsuspended your account as it does not appear to be in violation of the Twitter Rules:”

In other words, Twitter is admitting they got it wrong, stating they “apologize for any inconvenience.” Indeed, unjustly being silenced for 3.5 years is a huge inconvenience!

The same bad actors — namely, accounts that continue to engage in platform manipulation — have found success a second time in weaponizing Twitter’s reporting, an area that Twitter’s Trust & Safety Lead, Ella Irwin, has acknowledged is problematic:

Below is an example of an account recently calling for the mass reporting of my account:

It is encouraged that the reader scan through the accounts engaging with (i.e. liking/retweeting) the tweet. The vast majority of engagements involve what Twitter calls “artificial amplification,” meaning that inauthentic accounts seek to make content appear more popular than reality reflects. Every tweet from that account, in fact, is artificially amplified by a distinct network of inauthentic accounts.

Moreover, the same inauthentic accounts used by bad actors to artificially amplify content/game hashtags to trend, for example, are frequently used to mass report accounts that nefarious actors seek to silence.

Dodging Accountability

Once my account was reinstated, I, like many others, sought to capture the attention of Twitter’s Trust & Safety Lead, Ella Irwin, by tagging her in tweets:

Of particular interest to me was understanding why an account linked to the intelligence community was allowed to tweet my home address without any repercussions:

Seeing Irwin reply to numerous accounts that engage in platform manipulation — while ignoring tweets like mine that involve doxing — left me increasingly frustrated (and with little faith in a Twitter whose Trust & Safety Lead prioritizes engaging with accounts that violate their rules!):

Given my unsuccessful attempts at getting Irwin’s attention via Twitter, I opted for LinkedIn this go-around, sending her the following message yesterday (February 24th) morning:

Less than 24 hours later, I received the following email from Twitter, and my account has been “permanently suspended” since:

Given Irwin has opted to block me on LinkedIn as a result of my message, at least I now know that she is aware of the account that doxed me, and is purposefully choosing not to address/take appropriate action:

Instead, she has opted to bury her head in the sand by suspending my Twitter account and blocking my account on LinkedIn.

OK, So What’s Your Point?

Demanding more transparency — both from Twitter and from government — is the only way forward.

ALSO: sunlight is the best disinfectant!

** The Streisand effect is very powerful, hence please do me a huge favor and share this post to Twitter **

Social Forensics maps and monitors social connections and activity.

We create purposefully designed tools to manage social data analytics needs across various industries. Our focus is audience segmentation and identifying coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB) across social media platforms.

Geoff Golberg is an NYC-based researcher (and entrepreneur) who is fascinated by graph visualization/network analysis — more specifically, when applied to social networks and blockchain activity. His experience spans structured finance, ad tech, and digital marketing/customer acquisition, both at startups and public companies.

Geoff is the Founder/CEO/Janitor of Social Forensics.