Twitter Has ‘Project Guardian’ to Protect Public Figures

Twitter developed 'Project Guardian', a secret system to deal with attacks on high-profile accounts, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

Project Guardian, an internal list of thousands of accounts that could potentially be attacked by other users, is just a predictive aspect of Twitter's security measures, according to the report.

Unlike Facebook's treatment of VIP's, which has been criticized for allowing celebrities and politicians to break that platform's rules, Twitter's system doesn't grant more privileges to users.

Project Guardian also helps to protect normal people who end up going viral.

It includes some well-known athletes, media personalities, and politicians, but the list does not include famous users, according to Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of site integrity.

“The reason this concept existed is because of the ‘person of the day’ phenomenon,” Roth said. “And on that basis, there are some people who are the ‘person of the day’ most days, and so Project Guardian would be one way to protect them.”

While the new system helps to protect some users, it's also a smart way for the platform to squash harassment that could also hurt its own image.