Tell HN: Twillio immediately closes accounts with the word Palestine in them? | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Twillio immediately closes accounts with the word Palestine in them?

233 pointsgetcrunk41 comments

It was reported to me, and I confirmed, and so can you, by making a new account on sendgrid.com with an email such as plaestine@mydomain.com

Instead of a verification or welcome email you immediately get an account closure and violation of tos email.

Irrespective of the politics, such a crude filter is not a good look for Twillio who owns sendgrid.

I did not check if this is the case on Twillio it self.

Responding to the ticket has not revived a response automated or otherwise.

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That's crazy. There is absolutely no reason for this. I would understand if it were the word "Hamas" but this is just plain stupid.

Hamas is also a regular arabic word.

Might be a name too?

It might also be the constant barrage of Palestine based toll fraud most SIP providers witness. It's very common in telecom to blackhole consistently malicious ASNs that do not handle abuse reports.

Only a handful of networks make up the vast majority of SIP attackers, seems totally reasonable they would block any keywords related to toll fraudsters that previously scammed Twilio clients.

I would think they'd use other means like geolocation to restrict use in conflict zones if they were really concerned about abuses of their services.

This makes no sense because "Palestine" also refers to the West Bank/Fatah who are not participants in the conflict, and are not sanctioned

It also makes no sense for social media to pick sides. Federated social media has an advantage here over both centralized and completely decentralised.

Doesn't Twillio have encrypted comms? I wouldn't call this social media exactly. It seems Google and others are limiting the type of data shown in the conflict areas.

These type of actions will only lead to an outcome that will be extreme.

Eventually, it will lead to a genocide. Once it is all done, there will be a large body of research into how this happened. The primary purpose of it will be to feel good and pat ourselves on the back with how civilized we are.

Then we in the West will move on and try to find another group that we will like to hate.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

probably just a spam filter, just like many people use Twilio, Twilio probably uses the same filter

Instagram's translation service had an issue with this the other day too

good news: this is a great way to get customer support, especially if you sprinkle a little shame and assumption of malice onto it

This is disgusting, and those supporting Twillo's actions, equally so.

There are cities named Palestine in the US.

Tell HN:

Why?

I don't have a good guess on whether this is going to be flagged.

As I'm writing it got moved to the second page, position #55

Without being flagged, which is the same action but more cowardly.

73 points, 23 minutes ago, 14 comments. Can't even claim it triggered a flame war filter.

It's bad.

edit: it got flagged now, wasn't when I wrote this.

its been unflagged now but its at position 61. which is basically dead. i think it came back at pos 34 (still not front page which it was on) with Tell HN: added to the title, but a minute later went to 61 (third page).

Is this actually happening? Palestinians are no longer a people? To the point of being erased from the internet? Really? A human somewhere is moving this lever. Someone is actually trying to erase a whole group of people. Incredible.

If you are reading this: I hope you feel conscious responsibility for what you are doing. You are doing something wrong!

It is only a 70-80 years since WW II and the Holocaust. There haven't been much change in the dynamics of humans (culture, genetic or nation wise). I think people assume, on a daily basis, that it can't happen again so that they are not distracted by such an outcome. The events happening today shows that such a comeback is not out of the table.

There are no strong safe guards out there. And the people in charge will go for it if it suits their agenda. Polarization is also much easier today. People don't need to read a full book to get propaganda but just watch a few images or a video that triggers the right reaction.

The middle-east seems to be close to the point of no return on a full on scale apocalyptic war. I am looking at oil prices which suggests that all parties are bluffing and hoping that's the case.

This whole situation is because of WW2/holocaust. The UN decided to give the Jews a land they could govern so they wouldn't need to worry about government oppression after the holocaust. Of course the member states decided to give away land that was not theirs and had people living there already. It's no surprise conflict has been smoldering ever since.

Apartheid Israel has Act.IL shills flagging and downvoting everywhere. If you post some critical news of Apartheid Israel's war crimes on /r/worldnews, within a few minutes you get 10s of comments all with the same rhetoric. Same on here it seems; it's crazy.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act.IL

Just ridiculous!

Violating sanctions is a big deal and a risk no business wants to explore. It’s unfortunate but true that most of the automated solutions have a very high false positive rate (sanctions are way more expensive than unhappy customers). When I was at jpmorgan I was told there was literally an entire campus in Florida for double checking every flagged transaction.

Tl;dr it’s expensive to run any sort of zero false negative, low false positive screening process without a lot of dedicated engineering and manpower, and if you’re not a bank you’re gonna do a scheme that’s got a greater false positive rate to keep the costs manageable

The sanctions are against Hamas and Hesbola not the Palestinians.

Thank god nobody has ever lied about who they are online. Just ban the people who self label as Hamas.

Agree with this analysis but it's no where near sufficient to comply with sanctions. Said companies would still need to institute solutions that interrogate the nature of active marketing campaigns to avoid running afoul. This just seems lazy and (perhaps unintentionally) cruel.

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