Purplecon 2019 tom eastman, protecting people from social media harassment, https://purplecon.nz/talks#tom-eastman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1bTKHdvGjo&list=PLS45xFo74VF546tbfXXtKDO03cVrAalM6&index=16&t=0s
in some ways, twitter seems like it was designed from the ground up to be the perfect tool for harassment. twitter’s own mechanisms that are supposed to protect users sometimes seem to be pretty inadequate to the task. so i decided to make a few of my own. along the way, i got to grapple with some interesting challenges, including and especially how to build a tool safe enough for use by people who have been threatened online. in this talk i explore risks you have to consider, how you mitigate them, and the ethics of the decisions you end up making.
- Tom wrote Secateur, which tries to restrict dogpiling on twitter by blocking a blocked users' followers; but only for a period of time
- Therefore the app has to hold an OAuth token on behalf of its user
- Therefore it must be open source and able to be run by the user, because why should they trust Tom while they're being attacked?
- threat model the app server assuming the dogpilers will attack it as well