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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

> “When Twitter says, ‘We can’t do this,’ I don’t believe that,” said Hany Farid, chairman of the computer science department at Dartmouth College ... “There’s no fundamental technology or engineering limitation,” he said. “This is a business or policy decision. Unless the companies have decided that they just can’t be bothered.”

Can anyone comment whether this is true or not? It seems rather trivial to create new accounts and post data. Is it just whack-a-mole or is there something more sophisticated that goes on?

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There can always be some checking that happens as part of creating a new account.

Remember that to be effective, the follower needs to be able to find the new account when the old one is closed. They will do this by searching for an obvious keyword (in this case TurMedia or IslamicState), so checking the username against a block list of known terms previously used by terrorists should catch it.

For example, FB has a real names policy - try opening a FB account with a stupid name and see what happens - its not that hard.

A "real names policy" is not appropriate to every situation, since it is inherently hostile to users. Some have even criticized its use at FB.

While quite true, that is a "business and policy decision" for the most part.

I agree, but the point I was trying to make (perhaps unclearly), was that the username can be checked against a list of blocked patterns at account creation time.

FB has a "real looking names" policy, which has little to do with the names on people's government ID unless they get reported.

(And of course, the more lawless the area, the less likely someone is to even have an official identity)

If it's easy to create new accounts, then closing old ones is a losing battle for law enforcement. If it's hard to create new accounts, Twitter's business might just fall apart.

I wonder if an effective method would be to apply some sort of "shadowban" on the Twitter accounts instead of closing them.

wouldn't it be pretty obvious to them when they cannot see the shadow banned account from other accounts? I know people who do similar on reddit, keep a second/third/etc account around to periodically check their main if they should notice no replies or such.

How restricted can new accounts be made so that they have to pass a review without impacting new accounts to the point no one wants to use the service?

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