I’ll leave discussion of the physical protests to others for now, but I’m really worried about infiltration of (online) activist movements by domestic provocateurs and foreign agents — who will try to shape these movements towards their own objectives.

Please vet your sources. Don’t retweet someone you don’t know without figuring out who they are why they’re there. Don’t add new follows without doing a deep dive of those accounts. We are really vulnerable to information operations during these tumultuous times.

Some of those operations will just be trying to get into our networks. Your rt becomes an endorsement of that account (for others following you). They pick up a follow or two or ten or ten thousand. And now we have a new influencer in the movement who’s not who they say they are.

Even though they may seem to be saying the same thing as everyone else in the movement — even though they look like they’re on our team — they aren’t. And eventually, they’ll start to try to shape the conversation towards their objectives. And their objectives aren’t ours.

The end effect is that they undermine the movement — both directly, by shaping it towards some other objective; and indirectly, once discovered, and outsiders can point back at the movement and say, “see, they weren’t really about xyz, they were just a foreign operation"

Also, here’s where Twitter could really help their users by providing more contextual information about an account. For example, highlight if they’re brand new. If not, tell us the account description and handle they had a year ago. Help us figure out if they’re authentic.

Also also, if you make a mistake — CORRECT IT. Don’t just quietly retweet. Let you followers know that you got something wrong. Reach out to anyone who retweeted or liked. If it’s still getting retweets, delete it, but first take a screenshot and then tweet that w/ a retraction.

Also helpful here would be a “retraction” feature on @Twitter — which would allow a user to mark a tweet as retracted, stop it from spreading further, and somehow alert folks who had interacted with it to know that it was retracted. Something like a red box around the original.