By Dilip Bobb
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s personal Twitter account was “very briefly compromised,” according to the prime minister’s office. The tweet was deleted remarkably swiftly. The PMO’s own tweet said: “The Twitter handle of PM @narendramodi was very briefly compromised. The account has been immediately secured.” The key words here are “immediately secured”. That fits in with a recent, detailed investigative story by Bloomberg, the financial, software, data, and media company based in New York. The Bloomberg story reveals that Twitter Inc’s highest-profile users—those with lots of followers or political prominence—receive a heightened level of protection from the social network’s content moderators under a secretive programme code-named Project Guardian.
The internal programme’s list is in the thousands and includes politicians, journalists, musicians and professional athletes. When someone flags abusive posts or messages related to those users, the reports are prioritised by Twitter’s content moderation systems, meaning the company reviews them faster than others who file a complaint about their accounts being compromised.
Project Guardian, according to Bloomberg, ensures that issues related to prominent accounts that could provide negative publicity for the platform, are dealt with ahead of complaints from people who aren’t prominent. This, says Bloomberg, helps protect the Twitter experience of those prominent users, making them more likely to keep tweeting. “Project Guardian is just the internal name for one of many automated tools we deploy to identify potentially abusive content,” Katrina Lane, vice-president for Twitter’s service organization, which runs the programme, said in a statement.
The programme’s existence raises an obvious question: If Twitter can more quickly and efficiently protect some of its most visible users, why couldn’t it do the same for all accounts that find themselves at the receiving end of bullying or abuse or hacking? With more than 200 million daily users, Twitter has too many abuse reports to handle all of them simultaneously. That means that reports are prioritised, including how many followers a user has, how many impressions a tweet is getting, or how likely it is that the tweet in question is abusive. An account’s inclusion in Project Guardian is just one of those signals, though people familiar with the programme believe it’s a powerful one, according to the Bloomberg report.
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Project Guardian has been used to protect users from a range of different professions, and included journalists who write about topics that can result in harassment, like the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. Even Twitter’s own employees make it to the list. After the company first fact-checked then President Donald Trump’s tweets in May 2020, a Twitter executive was singled out by Trump and his supporters as the employee behind the decision, leading to social media attacks and death threats. Accounts are added to the list in several ways, including by recommendation from Twitter employees who witness a user getting attacked and request added protection. In some cases, a famous Twitter user’s manager or agent will approach the company and ask for extra protection for their client. Social media managers at news organisations have also requested extra protection for their colleagues who write high-profile or controversial stories. Users who are in the programme don’t necessarily know they are receiving any extra attention.
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It’s not clear whether there was any one event or incident that sparked Project Guardian, though it has existed for at least a couple of years, people familiar with the programme said. Twitter’s programme is another instance of the different treatment that social media apps provide to certain pre-eminent users and accounts. A Wall Street Journal investigative report from September found that Meta Platforms Inc., which owns Facebook and Instagram, was giving some prominent users special exemptions from some of its rules, leaving up content from these people that would have been flagged or removed from others. Twitter officials told Bloomberg that reports related to users who are part of Project Guardian are judged the same way as all other content reports the process usually just happens faster. As it did in the case of India’s prime minister who just happens to have 73 million followers on the platform.