Email Concerned About Twitter’s Shops Feature

Twitter, one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, announced its shopping feature ‘Shops’ in the past months. This feature, which has not yet come to Turkey, allowed brands that sell to display their products on their profiles, as well as allowing these products to be pinned to the top of the account.

Twitter started testing the feature with some accounts earlier this year, and made it accessible to all brands in the US in June. In addition, the Shops feature, unlike Instagram, did not allow users to purchase products on the platform, instead directing them to the seller’s site with a link. Now, there have been new developments regarding this new feature.

Twitter’s shops feature could cause personal and societal harm

An email sent to Twitter employees showed that the feature could be used to cause personal and societal harm. It was stated that this message, obtained by The Verge, was sent to a group of Twitter employees from various teams at the beginning of July. While addressing issues such as not prioritizing content moderation in email, existing and yet to come features in Shops ‘high risk’ described as.

‘ in the postrisk assessment‘, some elements of Twitter’s e-commerce tool were identified as high risk. one of them, store names and descriptions was the possibility that such places could be used by malicious people for harmful purposes. Brands using the feature can manually add products that may appear on Twitter and add custom descriptions to the board. It is thought that this feature can be used maliciously.

According to the memo, Twitter’s response to harmful content that may appear here and how infringements should be handled. no policy yet. It is also noted that there is no way for users to report problems that may be encountered in the store name and description section.

A feature that hasn’t arrived yet is also rated as ‘high risk’

Additionally, Twitter will add to Shops in the near future to enable it to reach more people.share windows Noting its feature, the e-mail also states that harmful content that violates the rules is likely to be seen more widely: “The feature that will allow the sharing of stores, visibility of harmful ingredients and products can increase. This can encourage malicious people to share and increase harmful and violating products.”

Twitter spokesperson Lauren Alexander also confirmed the email, stating that the message was part of an assessment by the security team. Finally, Alexander added that they are constantly working on the security of their services and that they will do the same at Shops.

Twitter had recently come to the fore with the statements of former security chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko. Zatko, the company major shortcomings in security practices He emphasized that he had problems in removing bot accounts.