Hope they release some kind of post-mortem report -- even if it was done out of malice, admitting that -- and providing some details on how this will be prevented in the future -- is much better than a vague excuse that leaves everything to the imagination.
Having never worked anywhere on the scale of Twitter, the only non-malicious kind of human error I can think of is like when Google accidentally blacklisted all of Internet as malware [0]. What would be the accidental step/keystroke that happened to target the most controversial user account? Unless @realdonaldtrump was part of the manual-moderation queue and a human accidentally approved the ban.
But that would seem to indicate that @realdonaldtrump (and other massive accounts) don't have a special flag to be treated differently, which sounds even worse of a bespoke-workflow-nightmare. @realdonaldtrump must get receive so many abuse reports that it would constantly show up in the moderation queue otherwise.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2009/02/google-glitch-b/
edit: Update from Twitter:
https://twitter.com/TwitterGov/status/926267806261407744
> Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We are conducting a full internal review.
Wow, I imagined ACL/auditing being not completely disciplined -- such as SREs having root-tier access. I never would have thought that a customer support employee had unchecked power to disable accounts. It makes some sense that they would have autonomy to quickly deal with obviously bad/fake accounts. But not with Trump-tier accounts. Not just because of Trump, but all the other major accounts/brands who use Twitter as a primary communication medium.
Having never worked anywhere on the scale of Twitter, the only non-malicious kind of human error I can think of is like when Google accidentally blacklisted all of Internet as malware [0]. What would be the accidental step/keystroke that happened to target the most controversial user account? Unless @realdonaldtrump was part of the manual-moderation queue and a human accidentally approved the ban.
But that would seem to indicate that @realdonaldtrump (and other massive accounts) don't have a special flag to be treated differently, which sounds even worse of a bespoke-workflow-nightmare. @realdonaldtrump must get receive so many abuse reports that it would constantly show up in the moderation queue otherwise.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2009/02/google-glitch-b/
edit: Update from Twitter:
https://twitter.com/TwitterGov/status/926267806261407744
> Through our investigation we have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We are conducting a full internal review.
Wow, I imagined ACL/auditing being not completely disciplined -- such as SREs having root-tier access. I never would have thought that a customer support employee had unchecked power to disable accounts. It makes some sense that they would have autonomy to quickly deal with obviously bad/fake accounts. But not with Trump-tier accounts. Not just because of Trump, but all the other major accounts/brands who use Twitter as a primary communication medium.