A guy's Twitter account got suspended after he made a death threat—against a mosquito

Twitter's abuse detection is still far from perfect.
 By 
Yvette Tan
 on 
A guy's Twitter account got suspended after he made a death threat—against a mosquito
Zica virus aedes aegypti mosquito on human skin - Dengue, Chikungunya, Mayaro, Yellow fever; Shutterstock ID 369189926 Credit: Shutterstock / Tacio Philip Sansonovski

Twitter wants you to know it's taking online abuse very seriously.

So much so that it's blocked a user who made death threats against a mosquito.

A Japanese user sent out a furious tweet after he was bitten by a mosquito, saying "Bastard! Where do you get off biting me all over while I'm just trying to relax and watch TV? Die! (Actually you're already dead)."

He later received a notice from Twitter saying his account had been permanently frozen and could not be reactivated.

According to news outlet SoraNews24, this was the message the user received:

"Thank you for using Twitter.

Your account has been frozen because it was used to send messages containing threats.

Tweets containing threats are not allowed under our terms of service.This account cannot be reactivated.

Thank you for your understanding."

The Japanese user, whose original account was named @nemuismywife, later created a new account @DaydreamMatcha, to rant about Twitter's decision.

"My account was permanently frozen after I said I killed mosquitoes...this is a violation?" he said in a tweet addressed to Twitter Japan.

Cyberbullying and online abuse is a huge problem for Twitter, with the social media platform recently announcing that it was "taking action" against abusive accounts "10 times more" than it was at the same time last year.

Twitter also last year debuted an algorithm to detect abusive behaviour -- which is probably how @DaydreamMatcha got blocked in the first place.

Artificial intelligence scripts go about looking and picking up key words, which in this case could be a combination of "Bastard", "Die" or "Dead."

It's unlikely that a human administrator reading the whole tweet and understanding the context of it would report the same tweet for online abuse.

Looks like AI still has some way to go.

[H/T: SoraNews24]

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Yvette Tan

Yvette is a Viral Content Reporter at Mashable Asia. She was previously reporting for BBC's Singapore bureau and Channel NewsAsia.

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