Twitter is a social media platform that is utilized by several high-profile accounts including politicians, celebrities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and more. Naturally, these users are also more susceptible to coordinated attacks such as trolling, due to their wider reach. However, it appears that Twitter has a system in place that protects these accounts from such activities.
As reported by Bloomberg, "Project Guardian" is the name of an initiative that aids in dismantling coordinated attacks against high-profile accounts. It is essentially a secret list of thousands of personnel that could potentially be attacked by other users.
Being on this list fast-tracks any complaints that are filed. The list contains not only famous people like musicians, athletes, and politicians but also users who get embroiled in everyday Twitter drama. As such, whenever Twitter receives a complaint from an account from this list, it responds to it faster than any other complaint lined up.
Twitter"s head of site integrity Yoel Roth told Bloomberg that the list doesn’t necessarily contain celebrities, it can be any regular user caught up in some controversy. Once the 15 minutes of fame wears off, the user will be removed from the list. Roth stated that:
The reason this concept existed is because of the ‘person of the day’ phenomenon. 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.
That said, a high-profile user can still have their manager personally ask Twitter to offer more protection. One thing of note about this initiative is that it doesn’t allow celebrities or politicians to break platform rules or grant them more privileges. Instead, it just responds to the complaints of these users faster than ordinary reports.