Twitter Empowers Powerful Botnet Armies

In response to a discussion about platform manipulation of Twitter by coordinated actors - aka bots - Elon Musk offered a million-dollar bounty to anyone who could identify who was behind them. I began to wonder if Elon was aware that Twitter provides companies like Block Party access to the Twitter API enabling them to create platform manipulation tools that look and feel a lot like botnet armies. Block Party is used extensively by transgender activists, Antifa militants, and Black Lives Matter promoters to allow them to act in a coordinated manner to manipulate Twitter’s algorithms to silence conservatives.

Tracy Chou is a self-proclaimed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion activist who founded Block Party Studios in 2018 to help amplify the visibility of marginalized communities while silencing their critics. Drawing on her experience as a software engineer at companies like Google, Facebook, and Pinterest, Chou recognized that platforms like Twitter could be easily manipulated by a small number of users. In response, she developed Block Party, a platform manipulation application that uses machine learning to amplify acceptable points of view while censoring those who hold objectionable or unacceptable views.

By early 2021 Block Party had raised almost $1.5 million from investors that included Ellen Pao, Alexia Bonatsos, and Alex Stamos.1 With that funding in hand Chou conducted a public relations blitz resulting in the publication of dozens of puff pieces in outlets like Vogue, Allure, Fortune, and The New York Times. The stories detailed how various marginalized groups were using Block Party to manipulate social media platforms.

Interestingly, almost every single one of those 2021 puff pieces has been scrubbed from the internet—they have even been removed from Archive.org.2 Why? There seems to be a concerted effort to conceal the true purpose of apps like Block Party.

Here are a few examples of the missing articles:

"How Block Party is Helping Marginalized Voices Combat Online Harassment" by Annum Khan, published in Vogue: Highlights the experiences of several women of color who have used Block Party to block abusive messages and protect themselves from online harassment is now missing from Vogue’s website.3

"How Women of Color Are Using Block Party to Protect Themselves Online" by Nandi Howard, published in Allure: Featuring interviews with several Black women who have used Block Party to filter out racist and sexist messages on social media.4

"Block Party App Aims to Help Marginalized Users Combat Harassment" by Taylor Lorenz, published in The New York Times: The article discusses the development of Block Party and how it can help marginalized users combat online harassment and abuse.5

"Block Party: A New Tool for Combating Online Harassment and Abuse" by S. Mitra Kalita, published in Fortune: The article highlights the experiences of several people who have used Block Party to filter out hate speech and harassment on social media, including women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.6

How it Works

The transgender community, perhaps more than any other group, embraced Block Party with a passion. The application allowed them to quickly build robust block lists that included hundreds of thousands of users. To start, the app gave them the ability to block anyone who liked a tweet from President Trump—a sure sign they were a bad person. The activists were then able to share their public or private curated block lists with other members of their community through the use of the Block Circles feature.

Inspired by the massive adoption rate of users from the transgender community Block Party created a “helpers” feature. It allows leaders of the community to ‘assist’ other users to build and manage their blocklists. The helpers can automatically block accounts that match certain criteria including an analysis of the users’ follower and interaction data to identify users who hold unacceptable views. Some well-known users include Roxane Gay (author and activist), Kurt Eichenwald (journalist and author), DeRay Mckesson (civil rights activist), Sophia Bush (actress and activist), Brittany Packnett Cunningham (activist and podcaster), Mark Hamill (actor), Tara Strong (actress), and Jemele Hill (journalist and commentator).

After Elon Musk released Twitter’s recommendation algorithm, it became clear how Block Party has been manipulating the platform. One of the most powerful signals Twitter takes into account when deciding to increase or decrease the visibility of a tweet is whether or not the user has been blocked—the more people who block them the less visible their tweets will be across the entire platform. Block Party allows a relatively small group to penalize users for their views instead of their behavior. 99% of the users who have been blocked by Block Party have never seen or interacted with the users they are blocking—but Twitter assumes they had good reason to block the user nonetheless. Perhaps even more insidious is the fact that Block Party gives users information about users they’ve never interacted with and encourages them to report behavior they have not witnessed. The app gives instructions on how to report users as well as tips and tricks aka ‘best practices’ for reporting violations.

Solution

The first step is for Twitter to simply cut off API access for applications like Block Party that are specifically designed to manipulate the platform. The second is to train Twitter’s algorithm to ignore ‘mass actors’. Hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Twitter users have been caught up in Block Party’s Block Circles and as a result, the visibility of their accounts has been suppressed and censored. It is time to give everyone a clean slate. Start over. Don’t allow small groups of ideologically aligned people to silence other groups of users—even if their intentions are good—it undermines the health of the platform. I can only imagine how many state actors may be doing the same thing. Elon—ignore mass action and block the manipulators.

UPDATE: Tweets about this particular post generated a LOT of reports from Germany. If you’re a conservative you’ve no doubt noticed a LOT of notices from Twitter that someone from Germany has reported your tweets. It happens to me almost every day. I always wondered why the Germans were so interested in my tweets. It turns out one of the ‘best practices’ that Block Party influencers suggest is the use of VPNs to pretend they are in Germany where internet laws are far more restrictive.7