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Comment by adbachman | Hacker News Reader

When a platform regularly allows individuals to receive thousands of personalized death threats, notifications and all, it’s fair for me to be "concerned about abuse" even though it doesn’t affect me.

That’s not a fake news or partisan politics problem, it’s a human empathy problem.

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What's the solution to the hundreds of death threats problem though? My understanding is the death threats come from twitter eggs, or replaceable accounts where it doesn't matter so much if you ban them, and it would require a lot of work from the moderators to do the banning, and the recipient would still get the death threats in the first place.

Twitter is a multi-billion-dollar company that employs world-class data scientists and engineers. Do you really think they can't automate detecting death threats from throwaway accounts?

One example of a mitigation for this kind of behavior might be to allow users to ignore messages for accounts younger than X, where X is a length of time chosen by the recipient.

This is only a mitigation, and there are plenty of ways one could get around this kind of limit. However, some action would be appreciated.

Then you get a death threat from an account someone set a few months ago to save for the moment they wanted to send a death threat.

I think if you built a piece of software that was able to reliably detect death threats, you could sell it not only to twitter. And for good money.

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