Yeah that definitely seems like a mistake. I tried it and it worked. I'm going to appeal it and see what happens. This must just be one of the algorithms going haywire or something.
Someone in the thread suggested a more probable (somewhat substantiated) reasoning: They got banned for "revealing private information". OP is thinking that someone at twitter tried banning publishing some address in Memphis, but somewhat it got tokenized (?) and so Memphis is now blocked.
>This must just be one of the algorithms going haywire or something.
That or maybe some random test code from development that got pushed into production by a series of accidents like a senior clicking Approve on the pull request of an intern without actually reviewing the code. Just a guess.
> What's possible is a Twitter staffer tried to block a street address, but the postal syntax acted as an escape sequence, or the original was multi-line and they only pasted the city.
What postal syntax in the US looks like an escape sequence?
Could be a typo or filling in whatever field incompletely - e.g. they meant to block a specific street address but only got the city name in the "block" field.
Probably the comma faking out a CSV parser? US addresses are typically written like "123 Fake St, Memphis, TN 38002" with commas between the street address and city, between the city and state, but not between the state and ZIP code.
e: I wonder if somebody with a large handful of accounts to burn could narrow down the intended block target by tweeting every combination of "{states_containing_a_memphis__abbreviation} {ZIP_code}" until one of them gets blocked? http://www.city-data.com/zipmaps/Memphis-Tennessee.html
The same user later tweeted: "to the people getting mad at me for this, it's ya' own fault for believing a single tweet from an unverified source instead of looking at the official twitter pages. i'm just havin' fun." https://twitter.com/SPLLTHEMANSNAME/status/13711921957772328...
So yes, unsurprisingly, something that "apparently" happened but wasn't sourced didn't actually happen.
Thanks. (In case people wander by later, this was tweeted half an hour after my post above, and the OP has made it clear in a parallel subthread that they were referring to something that was later admitted to be a hoax by the perpetrator.)
Oh! When I first read the headline, I thought of Windows 98 (codename: Memphis), and got excited this is gonna be something retro about an elite UX design.
I read that tweet as OL's social media team having heard of the problem and poking fun at Twitter. Nothing in that tweet suggests that there is a causal relationship with that specific person.
Out of the loop: what genie are they trying to stuff back in the bottle? Googling reveals that his transfer contract with full prices etc was leaked, but that appears to have been a few years ago.
I wonder if this is due to Memphis' association with racism, and it is an artifact of them trying to shut down the conversation about it becoming too overt by accident, instead of sneaky shadowbans, de-trending, and throttling.
Oh boy, the dumpster fire that just keeps on giving. I really hope Twitter does have audit trail on everyone being locked by this so they easily can unlock everyone again
Random thought of mine was companies use AI to moderate. But potentially malefactors can train the AI to flag harmless stuff. And because of the opaque nature of neural networks there isn't good mechanism to undo it, except by reverting.
I love the sheer number of hacker news commenters saying “Well I tried it, seems to work”. At what level do you guys go “I’m just going to assume those 10 other guys aren’t lying”
Exactly this. I’m also afraid that it sets a flag somewhere that “this person has been banned at some point” which will affect something down the line.
Me too. Also I decided to repeal the ban with the comment "Memphis" just for giggles. I visit Twitter maybe once a month(when an interesting link pops up here), so it's not like I absolutely need that account.
"Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure."
That's simply not true, evangelization is hard and requires connection to personal experience much more the convincing people of wet paint does, and it requires connecting it to personal experience for which people haven’t already accepted a better explanation, which is a lot harder than with “the paint is wet”. You don't just tell people “God exists” and they're like “Oh, sure, thanks.” (Well, except perhaps sarcastically.)
It’s a cute quote, but it has nothing to do with reality.
Yup. Getting someone to switch their religion is just changing a final link in the long, long chain of beliefs, most of which was created thousands of years ago, and which almost everyone internalizes in their formative years.
The belief in "invisible men in the sky" is older than human civilization. Even getting an atheist to convert to a religion is just a matter of convincing them about a bunch of details about a particular invisible man in the sky, and that they should pay attention to them. The majority of the work - convincing them that the very idea of an invisible man in the sky is something one can believe in - was already done by that person's family, all of whom had it done to them by their families, all the way back to neolithic.
> Yes you do, that's how children get indoctrinated.
Children may take parental guidance more easily on the existence of God than is the case with evangelization generally, sure (though still not as easy as the quote suggest is true of people taking such inputs generally.)
But then, they also, at the same ages where they’ll accept parental guidance on that, accept parental claims on more prosaic material fact, too. So, even then, the contrast suggested by the quote is bogus.
This is neat to look at from a psychological perspective. I bet there's a pretty good correlation between the people who see everyone else go, "yep, works as reported" and decides to try it for themselves anyway, and people who aren't easily convinced by research or science in other subjects.
To be fair, that correlation would probably cut both ways. For example, the people who don't decide to try things for themselves being more susceptible to being swayed by propaganda.
Interesting to look at, as you said. I assume that different personality types evolved because that made us more robust as a species.
Right, like all the intrepid outsider-scientists that are resilient to the propaganda of a round Earth. Sadly, many of the commenters here are still somewhat susceptible to propaganda, since they locked their account and then believed the results of the experiment. For maximum resilience to scientific propaganda, they should perform the experiment repeatedly and refuse to accept the results each time.
Sorry, maybe I didn't do a good job with my comment. A better more specific example of what I meant might be all the people who drank the cool-aid at Jonestown. They bought the cult propaganda hook line and sinker, and died for it. Sometimes people are too sceptical, sometimes they are not sceptical enough. I didn't mean that the twitter lockout was propaganda.
And my closing thought was that it probably make us better as a society that we have both sceptical and non-sceptical people.
Any easy testable critical claim should be tested. Science in action IMO. Nothing like empirical data collection.
At some point you may find a data point that deviates and doesnt lock the account and might be able to reason how/why it happened. If nothing else you can at least quickly verify with high confidence and not just take a small conesus' word.
Twitter has increasingly slid into user-hostile territory. I moderate /r/Twitter on reddit and we have a pinned thread just showing nothing but complaint after complaint, because content moderation is a failure when you attempt to scale it.
We'd like to get Twitter Comms to address it at some point, but the company is opaque. It's just nuts.
Just a small anecdote: I created a company account, then set the birthday to ~1 year ago, when the company was registered. Everything was fine for 5 minutes, then my account has been blocked with a notification telling me that I need to be at least 13 years old to use Twitter. I can still login but cannot access the settings to change the birthday (or just remove it) as a screen “fix your age or prove your identity” is blocking me from doing anything. I used their support form to send a proof of ID a few times but the account gets blocked again every time.
Somehow twitter believes that 1 years old are trying to join their platform. That was more than 6 months ago, and still no solution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I lost my Discord account for daring to use the "change your e-mail address" feature. Nothing warned me that this was a potentially-destructive action. It happens.
A year or two ago I went through every online account I have to change the email address.
I should have kept a record of results. Some were good and easy. Some had no option other than an account closure. Some involved a single contact of support without any real verification that I was actually the account holder. Some involved a protracted string of contact with support that tried to claim I was asking for an impossibility. Some services kept my old email on file and I periodically receive something to my old address.
I had way too many successful email changes that did not send an email to my old email account informing me of the action. If a hacker had stolen those accounts, I might not know for a long time!
>7. I have a “mixed audience” app and would like to age screen my users. Are there specific requirements for the age screen?
>An example of a neutral age screen would be a system that allows a user freely to enter the month and year of birth. Avoid encouraging children to falsify age information by, for example, stating that certain features will not be available to users under age 13.
Most hilarious one related to the 13yo boobytrap was that they lock you out if your date of registration predates your 13th birthday, regardless of how long ago it was.
Like, if you were younger than 13 at some point, and you didn’t prove yourself that you’re no longer 13, it can’t be ruled out that you potentially haven’t aged since, by Twitter logic.
Seen through survivorship bias it’s obvious that you may never set DoB for any of your accounts, but ... I guess Twitter is kind of weird one from what SNS is generally understood to be.
> Like, if you were younger than 13 at some point, and you didn’t prove yourself that you’re no longer 13, it can’t be ruled out that you potentially haven’t aged since, by Twitter logic.
No, that’s due to the fact that they don’t want to store any data about yourself from when you were under 13 years old. I had this happen to me when I changed my account age and it said it had to delete all tweets (amongst other info) from when I was <13 and my profile was wiped (bio, profile pic, website link), likely because they don’t timestamp profile changes in their DB (some audit log probably has it though).
I created a regular account. I followed a handful of people. Not long after (same day I think) it said they thought I was a bot and could I scan my ID and email it to them to verify I was a human.
I couldn't even log into the account to delete it without providing them a photo of my ID, so I said fuck that and never thought about it ever again.
Similar story: I finally created an account last week and after a few minutes of looking around, I tried to follow 1 person and got locked out. It requires a phone number to the unlock the account now. Just feels like gratuitous extortion of personal data. Also, seriously asking: Why does it even let you create an account with email if it will force you to give a phone number anyway?
Yeah, this phone number lock is really annoying. Depending on the state of the account you may have a link on the desktop version to bypass adding a phone number.
Content moderation is trivially easy when your users pay for it or have skin in the game. Making accounts paid would immediately fix the problem as few people would want to risk losing real money.
Content moderation only becomes a problem where your business model is "growth and engagement" and your revenue depends on your users generating as much content as possible.
If skin in the game was a guarantee we would have no crime. Spammers, astroturfers, and scammers already spend real money to get their message out for their purposes.
Real name polices already failed at their stated purpose even after people losing their job over tweets and Facebook posts was a well known things. Whatever fee people would be willing to pay wouldn't cut it. Hell it didn't work even on the infamous SomethingAwful!
It's not a guarantee but it's much better than what we have now.
All the issues you mention were successfully dealt with on the forums of the good old days with much less resources (moderation done by volunteers and very little technical expertise - definitely no machine learning).
If users are paying, you run into lawsuit territory when you try to censor them for their views. Not necessarily because you can't stop doing business with the person who you decide is an enemy of the people, but because you are still taking all the money of their followers and others who signed up to read their tweets. So accepting money would require a moderation policy that didn't change every other week but was clear and upfront in terms of what business services were being sold.
Unpopular opinion: I am not sure if I come to the the same conclusion (that Twitter is user-hostile). Even if you see "complaint after complaint". It could be actually true that the complaint ratio is going down, because the # of users or engagement is actually growing. I am not saying I know the rate, but I don't think we can rule that possibility out.
As a thought exercise, if you assume there is 1% chance of someone complaining about something that went wrong with their account. And there is a billion users using that service. You will have to have a super high accuracy to not end up in a world where there isn't a dozen+ people being affected each month. I believe that Twitter (and other services) actually do try very hard to avoid this, but it is a very hard problem.
To this, some HN users believe that they just should have say 100k+ humans moderating everything, but it is very hard to have 100K humans consistently moderate and not introduce biases.
I come to the conclusion that Twitter is user-hostile based not on complaints but rather by details mentioned in this post (user suspensions in response to posting 'memphis' in a tweet.) It doesn't take much else to make this determination.
I will note that your thought exercise is a statment, least in part, of Masnick's Impossibility Theorem (Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well):
It's not matter of scale; it is entirely unacceptable to ban users purely because they made a post containing a particular word[0], regardless of the circumstances and regardless of the rate[1].
0: and yes, that does in fact include words like "nigger" or "cunt", as this post (which contains those words) demonstrates.
1: Mumble mumble cosmic ray bitflips if you want to be pedantic, but I dispute the "because" on that one.
Sure. But to be honest, I thought it was substantative, because "Sounds like a you problem" is a possible response from AI moderation. I know that it's not OK, but it does happen.
350 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/okmsprime/status/1371189816289857538?s=2...
That or maybe some random test code from development that got pushed into production by a series of accidents like a senior clicking Approve on the pull request of an intern without actually reviewing the code. Just a guess.
> What's possible is a Twitter staffer tried to block a street address, but the postal syntax acted as an escape sequence, or the original was multi-line and they only pasted the city.
What postal syntax in the US looks like an escape sequence?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis,_Egypt
0: https://youtu.be/FEB-YG2iiYA
e: I wonder if somebody with a large handful of accounts to burn could narrow down the intended block target by tweeting every combination of "{states_containing_a_memphis__abbreviation} {ZIP_code}" until one of them gets blocked? http://www.city-data.com/zipmaps/Memphis-Tennessee.html
https://www.twitter.com/hackernewstop10
* https://gizmodo.com/twitter-banned-me-for-saying-the-m-word-...
So yes, unsurprisingly, something that "apparently" happened but wasn't sourced didn't actually happen.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/137123558771858227...
https://twitter.com/OL_English/status/1371121328649076744
I wonder if this is due to Memphis' association with racism, and it is an artifact of them trying to shut down the conversation about it becoming too overt by accident, instead of sneaky shadowbans, de-trending, and throttling.
You don't get censored on Chinese social media for discussing Xi Jinping's conduct in good, or bad light, it get censored for just discussing it.
Most censors don't give a fuck evaluating what they are told to censor, they just ctrl+f click click...
I don't doubt the attitude is shared across the pacific in the tech industry.
Automated moderation in action!
For something easily testable? Never.
Edit: Account just got locked, lol.
Anyone interested in testing the 5 times limit by using the Memphis?
I bet the lever will be popular.
https://xkcd.com/242/
https://xkcd.com/242/
Edit: oh noes, folks - this was an innocuous compliment on your adventurousness! :)
But admit I tricked a twitter friend into answering what the full title of "walking in ..." was
It’s a cute quote, but it has nothing to do with reality.
The belief in "invisible men in the sky" is older than human civilization. Even getting an atheist to convert to a religion is just a matter of convincing them about a bunch of details about a particular invisible man in the sky, and that they should pay attention to them. The majority of the work - convincing them that the very idea of an invisible man in the sky is something one can believe in - was already done by that person's family, all of whom had it done to them by their families, all the way back to neolithic.
Children may take parental guidance more easily on the existence of God than is the case with evangelization generally, sure (though still not as easy as the quote suggest is true of people taking such inputs generally.)
But then, they also, at the same ages where they’ll accept parental guidance on that, accept parental claims on more prosaic material fact, too. So, even then, the contrast suggested by the quote is bogus.
"telepathically wish for a vague outcome and retroactively ascribe something to that wish and validate your beliefs"
more powerful than you might think
Interesting to look at, as you said. I assume that different personality types evolved because that made us more robust as a species.
And my closing thought was that it probably make us better as a society that we have both sceptical and non-sceptical people.
At some point you may find a data point that deviates and doesnt lock the account and might be able to reason how/why it happened. If nothing else you can at least quickly verify with high confidence and not just take a small conesus' word.
We'd like to get Twitter Comms to address it at some point, but the company is opaque. It's just nuts.
Somehow twitter believes that 1 years old are trying to join their platform. That was more than 6 months ago, and still no solution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The company is just hostile to its users.
I should have kept a record of results. Some were good and easy. Some had no option other than an account closure. Some involved a single contact of support without any real verification that I was actually the account holder. Some involved a protracted string of contact with support that tried to claim I was asking for an impossibility. Some services kept my old email on file and I periodically receive something to my old address.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/com...
>7. I have a “mixed audience” app and would like to age screen my users. Are there specific requirements for the age screen?
>An example of a neutral age screen would be a system that allows a user freely to enter the month and year of birth. Avoid encouraging children to falsify age information by, for example, stating that certain features will not be available to users under age 13.
Like, if you were younger than 13 at some point, and you didn’t prove yourself that you’re no longer 13, it can’t be ruled out that you potentially haven’t aged since, by Twitter logic.
Seen through survivorship bias it’s obvious that you may never set DoB for any of your accounts, but ... I guess Twitter is kind of weird one from what SNS is generally understood to be.
No, that’s due to the fact that they don’t want to store any data about yourself from when you were under 13 years old. I had this happen to me when I changed my account age and it said it had to delete all tweets (amongst other info) from when I was <13 and my profile was wiped (bio, profile pic, website link), likely because they don’t timestamp profile changes in their DB (some audit log probably has it though).
https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/account-re...
I couldn't even log into the account to delete it without providing them a photo of my ID, so I said fuck that and never thought about it ever again.
Content moderation only becomes a problem where your business model is "growth and engagement" and your revenue depends on your users generating as much content as possible.
Real name polices already failed at their stated purpose even after people losing their job over tweets and Facebook posts was a well known things. Whatever fee people would be willing to pay wouldn't cut it. Hell it didn't work even on the infamous SomethingAwful!
All the issues you mention were successfully dealt with on the forums of the good old days with much less resources (moderation done by volunteers and very little technical expertise - definitely no machine learning).
As a thought exercise, if you assume there is 1% chance of someone complaining about something that went wrong with their account. And there is a billion users using that service. You will have to have a super high accuracy to not end up in a world where there isn't a dozen+ people being affected each month. I believe that Twitter (and other services) actually do try very hard to avoid this, but it is a very hard problem.
To this, some HN users believe that they just should have say 100k+ humans moderating everything, but it is very hard to have 100K humans consistently moderate and not introduce biases.
I will note that your thought exercise is a statment, least in part, of Masnick's Impossibility Theorem (Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well):
- Any moderation policy will anger someone
- Content moderation is inherently subjective
- Errors at scale result in many errors over time
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...
0: and yes, that does in fact include words like "nigger" or "cunt", as this post (which contains those words) demonstrates.
1: Mumble mumble cosmic ray bitflips if you want to be pedantic, but I dispute the "because" on that one.
> [dead]
Et tu, HN?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26458641.