Most likely, but then I wonder, what do their 1k-5k (according to CrunchBase) employees really do? A simple spam flagging system (that’ll take care of the lowest hanging fruit aka very obvious spam) can be built even by a single engineer.
I see comments like this coming up on Hacker News almost every month and I tend to think that people who make these comments are either too young and/or have not worked for a mid-sized to a large company.
If you have worked in any company that deals with internet-facing traffic serving the size of audience that Twitter does, it should be obvious that 1k employees is nothing if you want to have all the necessary teams you need to keep the business running, for example, software engineering, software support, hardware engineering, hardware support, network engineering, software engineering, HR, finance, legal, PR, management, IT department, etc.
A company of this scale is not just code and raw technical skills. There are many nuances that you need to appreciate before you understand why it involves 1k-5k employees.
I've worked for a number of internet companies (including half of FANG), and to be honest, if they wanted to clean up a lot of this stuff by having one or two data scientists tackling low-hanging fruit it would go a long way.
Typically it doesn't happen because it's more profitable to use data scientists to sell more ads.
Before being acquired by Facebook, WhatsApp was supporting 900 million users with only 50 employees. So it can be done if you know what you're doing, run a robust tech stack, and don't worry about customer service (and to be clear, Twitter doesn't do customer service, either).
Because Facebook? Because they switched from providing a great service to try and milk out as much money as possible from their users by the way of ads and privacy violations?
I've reported someone leaking Polish court documents of an ongoing case on Facebook - nothing happened.
I've reported a YouTube video praising Anders Breivik as an European hero defending whites from Marxists, Leftists and Muslims - it's still up.
I've created a Twitter account and it got instantly locked for being 'suspicious' or 'automated' (but of course giving them my phone number would fix it instantly) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014511
Your attitude on this entire thread has been incredibly condescending. Why don't you try and think of why these problems are hard instead of just assuming they are all easy, as you've done so far?
I challenge you try and think through why your simple spam filter and human appeals process will not scale to Twitter's size. What kind of throughput can it handle? What happens when there is more content being appealed than the review team can handle? How do you prevent attackers from maliciously flagging other users' content? How do you handle advanced threats where attackers compromise existing accounts then begin to spam, thus bypassing any "easy" checks like looking at account age? How do you classify "hateful" speech? How does it scale to foreign languages, slang, etc?
Well the existing system doesn’t seem to be working right. Blatantly obvious spam is allowed to remain, just see the spam replies to any big account’s tweets or spam on certain popular hashtags.
Or the existing system works as designed but your suggestion of a "simple spam flagging system that could be written by one engineer" is not a sufficient solution. (And keep in mind that any anti-spam tools will be definitely abused be trolls and other malicious actors to harass innocent users)
