Ben's account is already un-suspended, but only because he has a major presence and large audience (I would be shocked if people at Twitter didn't see this minutes into it happening or if Ben didn't have some direct line to various high up employees there).
For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.
Even blue checkmarks don't help against trolls, far right and griefers running mass-report attacks.
The problem at its core is that Twitter refuses to hire appropriate levels of moderation staff for the scale it has, and that it does nothing against raid instigators. Reddit at least has subreddit mods take care of most of the bullshit and at least the large subreddit mods have direct connections to Reddit, and Reddit itself fights back against communities that "raid" other subs, but even there it's common experience on subreddits like TwoX that women get reported to the Reddit Suicide Alert.
Twitter however? Good luck if you're not in Germany where you can file for emergency civil injunctions against Twitter in the case of wrongful bans (Twitter and FB both learned the hard way to not ignore these) or have friends in media that can amplify your shitstorm. Twitter moderation teams only act on reports, they unlike Reddit don't seem to have any staff dedicated to monitoring sentiments and trends to detect abusive behavior.
You can report any post or comment on reddit, an one option is "self-harm or suicide" https://i.imgur.com/aGLtTeW.png I think it meant in a way that you are afraid of the person. If you are the one reported then you also get an automatic system message from reddit: someone thought you might have problems etc. Basically the suicide alert.
Anyways people use it all the time in every single sub for any unrelated thing, just because they hate you, downvoting is not enough, trolling etc. In sport subs it's very common to report opposing fans with this option for example
I comment a lot on /r/cfb and /r/nfl and I wasn’t aware of this. I don’t really trash talk, but I’m surprised at least one of my thousands of comments hasn’t elicited a suicide alert.
Which, just to be clear, is meant to convey the opposite obviously. "Reddit cares" is 99.99 % used by people to send others (I've seen mostly women raise this) a "kill yourself" message. Just like people who put "heartwarming" awards on posts about abuse, harassment etc.
On some subreddits every other post will be reported like this.
Meanwhile, Reddit tends to do very little about reports of even direct violence threats ala "I will find you and I will kill your children" etc. which are frequently found to "not be in violation of the terms of service".
You can report someone if you think they're suicidal and they get a pm from reddit that says "we care about you, here's a suicide prevention hotline etc". It's used for trolling for some reason.
There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale. It's societal techology we as humans do not have. Underlying moderation is some shared vision of decency - morality claims that should be enforced via justice. These claims certainly don't exist across nation borders, and they barely exist within a given nation's borders.
The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on top of the first. How do Twitter accounts map onto human bodies? Is it 1:1, like government ids? 1:many so brands can have accounts? many:1 so humans can amplify their voice? Until this is answered all moderation actions taken in the name of 'bot policy' is capricious. As is the assignment of blue checkmarks.
Reddit struggles with these same problems at website-scale, where moderation must work across subreddits. They only appear to have a better solution because some topics at subreddit-scale make enough of the questions I raise irrelevant that you can install a goon and have them moderate via edict. Just like chat rooms and message boards did in the old days. To make that point a little clearer: you can be off-topic in a subreddit or an Orange Site thread, but you can't be off-topic anywhere on Twitter.
This sounds a lot like what I'm working on with Notado Feeds[1]. Users can curate feeds (with RSS subscriptions) on specific topics from their libraries that get automatically populated. I haven't published a dedicated article on this feature yet, but it's coming.
For an idea of what it looks like in practice, these are my feeds on software development[2] and capitalism[3]. Interested in one but not the other? No problem, ignore the capitalism feed and just sub to the software development feed; you don't have to be hit by a train of all of my thoughts on every little topic by subscribing to an all-encompassing feed.
I'm currently working on a piece around feed discoverability that will integrate RSS subscription stats in few interesting late 90s/early 00s-web ways.
That’s a nice idea, but needs just one step done before: moderation should be placed in the each user’s hands.
I need my own filter about what I see. Like:
1. I always want to read A.
2. I always want to read B, but not when he is talking to C.
3. Show me some random people from time to time, like 3 per day.
And we can share our own “filters”, that creates opt-in curation.
Echo-chamber is indeed a problem, hence rule 3. Also I hope for rule 1 to find people who talk to their opponents meaningfully. But if a person wants to stay in an echo-chamber - she can. I just to not want to be forced into someone else’s echo-chamber.
I feel like if you changed to word goon to police, it would change the tone of your last paragraph a bit, though not the idea. This is a good summary of how I've come to feel about the subject.
> There's no such thing as appropriate moderation at Twitter scale.
If you mean it doesn't exist, that's arguable. If you mean it can't exist, that's nonsense. Just imagine for a second that moderation made money somehow. Boom! A moderation force that can take on planets full of new people. Tech companies are just cheap when it comes to dealing with end users. There is no obstacle but money to them creating capable moderation or customer support. It's a choice (to put profit first.)
No, the parent post makes a quite reasonable point that it can't exist, not because of any resource constraint but because there can't be a globally, universally acceptable appropriate moderation standard - different subcommunities have mutually incompatible requirements which can not be satisfied by any common standard; what's clearly acceptable in one place may even be illegal to say in another.
Well, perhaps you can, if you limit the discussion so that you can't discuss borders of countries, existence of certain countries, rights of certain groups, existence of certain groups, self-identity of many of your users, politicians, politics, religion and a bunch of other topics. If you ban all of these and permit just posting what you had for lunch, then perhaps you can make an universal moderation standard - but I would not call it "appropriate moderation" anymore.
That's a the normal, flaccid excuse. Twitter has the power to overcome the exact obstacles you mention. It's a choice to abstain from moderation, in favor of profit, like I said.
Twitter sees 829,094,400 tweets/day. Wikipedia has 166,666 edits/day. So we're already talking about a factor of nearly 5000x. The number of contributors is also spectacularly different: according to [1] Wikipedia had edits from only 122,821 distinct users in the last 30 days. Twitter claims 237.8 million mDAU (which could be a low or high count, since the "m" stands for monetizable and users may not post.)
Rely on users to report the bad apples, ban accounts who abuse the report features, and provide people whose identity has been proven with a government-issued ID card with a safety switch that enforces human moderation for "spam" reports.
Right now Twitter isn't doing anything but the first part, which is why "I got mass report banned on Twitter" stories are so commonplace. They need not be, if Twitter would do their goddamn job.
A major financial criticism of Twitter is that their profits are too low compared to their revenues, mostly because of high salaries. Objectively, they're "doing their goddamn job" too well right now: I doubt a newly debt-laden private Twitter will be able to afford an increase in these human resources.
I don't think the automated abuse detection systems need to go away. They should still be around, but only serving to notify human moderators of what they find, not doing any deletions or bans themselves.
> Why would you need to do that? You can just have humans review the reports that algorithms generate...
At some point, in designing the algorithms, in instructing the human reviewers, and so on, you still need to agree on what abusive means. So there's no way around that.
As to the volume, I agree, one can deploy algorithms as a first filtering step. In this case, I don't usually trust humans to be smarter than algorithms, but I do trust humans to be better at abuse than algorithms are at recognising it—unless the algorithms have so many false positives that they're barely filtering at all.
Let the users curate their own feeds rather than trying to curate things centrally. If some threshold of users have blocked one twitter user, then ban them maybe, otherwise leave it alone. They can remove obvious spam or whatever, but let me choose whether to ban that particular take on a subject or not from my feed.
I'm likely in the minority on this, but I'd rather have the control than trust others to moderate in my best interests for me.
> Haven't Wikipedia and Stack Overflow figured out the right way to moderate at scale?
I think their different goals make it easier (which is not to say easy!) to figure out an appropriate moderation style. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; it is easier to impose norms on an encyclopedia than a social platform. I don't have such a pithy summary of what SO is, but, as basically a knowledge repository rather than a social platform, it, too, can afford to impose certain norms that would stifle a social space. And yet, even with this head start, they can still face considerable flare-ups of controversy!
> The problem at its core is that Twitter refuses to hire appropriate levels of moderation staff for the scale it has
I don't believe that anyone could moderate at Twitter's scale. More than 500 million tweets are published per day. How do you moderate that? It's like bringing an umbrella to a tsunami.
Not to mention, Reddit moderation is crap. I've tried to use Reddit several times but gave up each time, because my innocent comments — mainly writing technical help — were getting moderated. I wasn't writing anything political; I couldn't even post on r/apple! They still use a lot of automation on Reddit in the bigger subreddits.
You can't operate a chemical factory without paying for adequate measures to prevent spewing toxic waste into common resources like air and water, so why should you be allowed to run a facility that spews toxic hate into societies without establishing adequate protection?!
If there is one thing that made the internet so toxic, it was services labeled as "free" that in reality were nothing more than avenues for advertisers to shove ads down our throats, with the cost being our societies breaking apart as a result of all the lone village nutcases suddenly unifying themselves and no one paying for the virtual equivalent of the police to make sure the nutcases don't create chaos.
To be clear, I'm not defending Twitter. If I was in charge, I would actually shut down Twitter for the benefit of the world. My point is just the basic financial fact that Twitter doesn't have enough money to do this, and thus they won't, indeed can't.
Of all the forums, websites, social media, etc I've used, never have I experienced worse moderation than reddit. I've never been banned, but I've had comments removed for some of the most arbitrary reasons, and the average moderator seems to almost despise their own userbase, with the exception of their fellow mods.
To cite a particularly egregious example, I once saw a person banned for "giving medical advice" on /r/adhd, while not one, but multiple other moderators had also given medical advice in the exact same thread. A thread that was explicitly asking for medical advice.
Yep. My account got suspended a few years ago. But to be honest, it was a blessing in disguise. Twitter for me was a huge time sink, even though I followed really interesting people talking about things I was really interesting. But once I got a forced detox, I realised I just gained back hours a week to do other things.
It's almost like tools/technology comes with both good and bad sides, TV and other things included. Internet has made humans more connected than ever, which means both the good and the bad from being connected becomes amplified.
I mean that's sort of like saying that TV is great as long as you stick to public access channel available over-the-air from 10:30AM to noon. Isn't that describing an extremely small niche of website? Almost everything has ads. A lot of sites have login walls, many (maybe even most?) have paywalls, especially once you step away from personal blogs.
Why not just use something running on the activity pub protocol? The fact that farcaster isnt even interoperable with various fediverse projects makes me doubt their intentions in this space.
It's going to take a lot more time and a lot worse crap on the internet to have a greater negative impact than FoxNews has had over its last 10 years. So for that reason, TV is still far worse for humanity.
On the positive side, internet has given us access to a lot of valuable information (for those who seek it out), whereas TV only makes available what the media companies want you to have access to.
I am always amazed when I see (justified) criticism of Fox News without mentioning CNN and MSNBC as equally culpable for a decline in American society. To not see this has to be the result of political partisanship or willful ignorance.
I believe the OP's point is that almost every new technology is greeted with accusations of being worse than what came before and what it's assumed it will replace, whether or not that actually proves to be the case. The examples may seem facetious, but they're all real.
I do think a case could be made that the changes in communication driven by the internet actually are different, but it's not the change itself, per se, as much as the speed of change. Pre-internet these changes were generational, and they generally took a generation (or more!) to be fully adopted and integrated into society. Now they're coming every decade or less, sweeping through the world in a matter of years.
My point is, I don't think people really said that about telephone and telegraph. Not every new technology was taken as being worse, so dismissing problems of Twitter just because it's new and "people hated everything new" isn't really good.
And then Facebook started taking money from governments, and the messages organizing grassroots movements became extremely short lived and started to lose reach.
I certainly remember waves of American newscasters declaring Twitter as a force for democracy when regimes were falling in Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. America again leading the way in global freedom, etc.
They weren't as enthusiastic on January 6th, 2021. That was Twitter-led too.
The web was great back when it was mostly read-only. You could comment and share, but only via email, so only to people you likely knew. Yes, I remember chain mails from 1997, but those were rare, maybe 2x a year. You probably saw that many dumb posts in the last 5 minutes of scrolling Twitter/FB/IG.
Once social media replaced bookmarks, people went there to find new links. And eventually, when SM de-ranked posts with external links, more and more of the feed became about exclusively in-app material, which was echo chambers and arguments and abuse.
> The web was great back when it was mostly read-only.
???
Justin Hall's call to arms "HTML is easy as hell"[0] was written nearly 30 years ago. The cycle Hall promoted is non-centralized, noncommercial and read-write.
If you're running a business, you most likely need to meet people where they are at. Sometimes, your target audience are mostly on Facebook, then you most likely need to be at Facebook in order to reach them. Sometimes they are on Twitter, then you need to be there. Other times, you're doing something completely different, like running a restaurant, then you need to be visible on Google Maps/Tripadvisor, otherwise you'll lose out on ton of business.
It's really hard to just start a business without having any place for finding users for it, and sometimes the best place is Twitter but you're shit out of luck if you get banned...
If your customers are somewhere, you could be there too, and that often has the least amount of friction or is the easiest choice, so it's understandable why so many people elect to do it. But another thing you could do is bring them to where you are.
If your business outreach succeeding requires you to first convince people that they should stop using some platform that is important to them, you might as well give up on your original business because you're probably going to spend all your time on that effort.
I'd say you must be a man of principle who enjoys suffering. Getting people off of Twitter and into bookstores is probably not the fight you want to spend your life on, unless you expect some great author to chronicle your adventures.
Absolutely, everyone has the freedom to start a business or not. And if you do, you have a choice about how to run it, what channels to use for talking/reaching users/customers. You could just have a phone number and not accept anything else as a support channel. The choice is entirely up to you :)
Most people who run businesses opt for meeting people where they already are though.
> I think I'd prefer to find a different line of business, if it were me.
It's almost every line of business. You probably need a mildly active twitter/facebook/instagram presence if you have a nice nail salon, or toy store. Anything not in a huge popular franchise.
edit: this sentiment puts me in mind of a watch or shoe repair shop guy in the 1960s who refuses to install a telephone because he wouldn't want customers who think that they could just loudly barge into whatever he was doing at will. Telephone culture brings a sense of unearned entitlement that attracts bad people. But you miss out on business worth far more than the irritation without a telephone. Keep the telephone outside the actual shop and hire someone else to answer it. They used to call answering machines "phone butlers."
There’s a lot of abuse reporting abuse. If you interact with people, there are psychos who will put you in some sort of list and constantly report you.
I have a friend who is a minor public figure who gets taken down this way regularly.
I started poking around his tweets, which led me to his reddit account, in which he complains about getting his Fidelity account suspended for what turned out to be posting his account number in public. I also found his blog, in which he has a post interacting with an obvious scammer and along the way gave out his social security number (it's still up there buddy, I'd think about blurring it out if I were you).
Anyway if that's a pattern it might have something to do with that.
No Twitter account for me after several run ins with just shitty people being shit.
I'm not going to say it was life changing, but it is stress that is now gone. Would highly recommend to anyone that has higher stress levels, it's possible SOME of it is coming from your social media use. In my case, it was work that was the big cause, but, removing myself from social media resulted in a noticeable improvement.
You have to be aware of the origins of the stress and they are likely many. Even here on HN I find myself making the decision to not continue to engage with someone who's responded to one of my posts because I can already predict it's going to race down a rabbit hole of pointless arguments. It's simply not worth talking to some people.
I think part of the problem is that people don't realize that a lot of what they are doing is contributing to their own stress.
This is a good policy in general. Say everything you want to say in one comment, and do not reply back to anything. Replies are where people start getting defensive.
Even if the discussion is friendly, once you've said your piece, it is usually best to let others reply. The discussion gets better the more unique perspectives are in it.
> This is a good policy in general. Say everything you want to say in one comment, and do not reply back to anything. Replies are where people start getting defensive.
Easier said than done, especially when a reply criticizes you, but this is probably right. I've greatly regretted many HN back-and-forth exchanges. It almost never ends well.
I got my Amazon account deleted. I have old credit card linked to AWS with billing address in one city of Ukraine.
Few weeks later after city been occupied I got message from Amazon that my account is locked due to sanctions. They give me ability to comply by removing offending credit card. But I can't do this because account is locked. I've got zero human response only broken scripts from support that I need to login and change my details.
I’ve stopped using Amazon after AWS started political censorship. Actually, saves you a lot of money: much less impulse buying. It appears a lot of my impulse buying was caused by my trust in Amazon return policy :)
that is not political censorship, it is illegal for US businesses to do business with Russia because of sanctions. The sanctions themselves are political, but not following them is not a choice for US businesses.
The treasury has no business banning books. It has nothing to do with sanctions. It's purely political. Whatever happened to all the people shouting that "Republicans are banning books"? Banning books is okay, but only if it's for the right now?
There were extremists on the site making calls to violence. A *private* entity deciding they don’t want to do business with a company because of that is neither censorship as a society would consider it nor is it problematic. More people and businesses should be willing to refuse business to entities that seek to harass, abuse, or promote violence to another group of people. What you’re worried about is governmental action and is not equivalent here.
Your logic is flawed on many levels, and I will be glad to parse the errors after I have my breakfast and nothing more important emerges. Just one point for now:
> What you’re worried about is governmental action and is not equivalent here.
My kids tried to point me in the same direction. I’ve just pointed them to the router and said: I am a private citizen paying for Internet connection in this house. In 24 hours this router will be configured to drop all connections to Amazon, Facebook and Twitter. Prepare yourself.
Boy, how worried they were. Never seen any person more worried in my life. See, they use Facebook for studies and Amazon for buying textbooks, so why I am so cruel?
I said: exactly my point. I was not that cruel though, but probably I should have.
They're both not government action, but they're very different kinds. There's a huge difference between "I will not assist this entity" and "I will stop other people from assisting this entity".
Along similar lines, I am deeply upset with the level of power that payment processors have/use around censorship. But I don't care too much what AWS does.
>There's a huge difference between "I will not assist this entity" and "I will stop other people from assisting this entity".
On one hand - exactly! This is why I hate that Amazon stops me from using Parler, instead of not using it itself.
On other hand - my kids faced much less obstacles than Parler:
1. They are adults, they could have purchased their own internet connection.
2. They are Russians, they know how to use VPN. Theoretically .
They are just busy people, they could have coped, but would have some extra unnecessary troubles to overcome. And just a possibility of these small extra troubles caused a lot of worrying. (Parler failed to cope, they were too reliant on Amazon services or something, so unprofessional).
> On one hand - exactly! This is why I hate that Amazon stops me from using Parler, instead of not using it itself.
You have twisted what I said past the breaking point. Amazon didn't stop anyone else from hosting or accessing Parler. They only refused to assist it themselves.
> they know how to use VPN.
Oh if VPN is allowed then it's significantly less of a problem. But you're still blocking it on the main network in a way that goes significantly beyond what Amazon did.
Infrastructure should not block. I don't feel like AWS is monopolistic enough to count as infrastructure.
How is taking money from me is assisting me? Amazon was not financing Parler, no providing it any discount, afaik. Me - I was assisting my kids by providing them Internet for free. Want Facebook? Pay for it yourselves.
>But you're still blocking it on the main network in a way that goes significantly beyond what Amazon did.
What is the "main network"? What I was blocking exactly? Call a provider, schedule an appointment, buy a WiFi switch... Yes, you could have missed an assignment or two, but nothing was blocked.
Exactly like Parler - it eventually coped and moved, just missed that "laptop story" bandwagon.
>I don't feel like AWS is monopolistic enough to count as infrastructure.
I think it is, I think it is. Even more worrying (to me) - Amazon participated in a coordinated shutdown of Parler on app stores and hosting sites. That was definitely an abuse of my money they "assisted" me by taking it, so they are not getting it anymore. An attitude recommended to everybody.
> How is taking money from me is assisting me? Amazon was not financing Parler, no providing it any discount, afaik.
Getting paid to provide a service is still providing a service. If you don't like the word "assist" then whatever pick your own word. There's so many server providers that I don't think any of them should be obligated to do business. But ISPs and payment processors should be obligated, in my opinion.
> Me - I was assisting my kids by providing them Internet for free. Want Facebook? Pay for it yourselves.
> What is the "main network"? What I was blocking exactly? Call a provider, schedule an appointment, buy a WiFi switch... Yes, you could have missed an assignment or two, but nothing was blocked.
This part is a bit complicated when we're talking about all adults, but normally the head of household is in charge of the utilities and other people aren't expected to get their own. So that makes it the main network. If you want to filter the network in this situation, it's not unjustified, but you're definitely standing in between the two parties rather than refusing to interact yourself.
> Even more worrying (to me) - Amazon participated in a coordinated shutdown of Parler on app stores and hosting sites.
The app store takedowns are significantly less appropriate than Amazon's shutdown given their monopoly power.
This is an incredibly weak analogy because parents regularly limit access to sites for their children and it’s seen as a healthy treatment of the internet. I must say I’m completely lost on what you were intending to get across
> There were extremists on the site making calls to violence.
Extremists on Twitter often make calls to violence too. Why do we let Twitter stay online and just ban those individuals instead of kicking Twitter offline?
“We” didn’t take parler offline. AWS did, surely after some pressure. In addition to this, Twitter should and is held accountable by society. You can’t possibly have missed the entire debate on its moderation. Of course, twitter also does more to
Moderate the content on its site than Parler did which is what got it booted off AWS. Few services want to be associated with radical ideologues spreading violence.
> There were extremists on the site making calls to violence.
Amazon sees fit to sell innumerable books by extremists which call to violence. Particularly, but not only, many famous religious texts and political manifestos.
On one hand I agree fully with this. On the other hand, if the government either is now or will eventually be owned by corporations then we might as well start setting a precedent of holding large corporations to the same standards as government.
>if the government either is now or will eventually be owned by corporations
Railroad period in California politics. About 187x or so.
The (only) transcontinental railroad is completed. The owners, Stanford (yes, that Stanford) and Co see the enormous economic power in their hands. They can set tariffs as they please. If a farm is owned by a relative or a loyal person - shipping oranges to Chicago is extremely profitable. A "bad" person gets a prohibiting tariff. So, only a loyal person can be elected at any post. Only a loyal person can own a (profitable) newspaper.
This continues for a couple dozen years, then there is a popular revolt and no railroad-connected person can ever be elected anywhere. And the first anti-monopoly laws are introduced. Suddenly a private business can't set private tariffs as it's pleased.
"What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun."
-- Having said that, the post you agree with is flawed on much simpler basis. The constitution protects us from government censorship. Protection from private censorship (and yes, it's a censorship) is placed in our own private hands. So to say "nothing to worry about" is extremely counter-productive. Exactly because there is no other recourse except the private action of stopping dealing with a business that engages is censorship.
1. There were bad people on the site, whom other people (you included) wanted to shut up. The site refused to do so. This speaks to the quality of the site, no? They refused to censor something while there was a strong push to censor it - that means they will probably not censor you, when your opinion will differ from the opinion of powerful people. That means that a person should rather support the site that does not censor opinions the person does not agree with.
Unless the person hopes to always agree with the opinions of the powerful people even when the powerful opinions change.
2. The logic of the federal constitution prohibiting only Congress to pass censorship laws, as far as I get it was: if a business indulges in censorship, customers can drop it and go to its competition. That's exactly what I am doing - defending the American way of life one less purchase on Amazon at a time. Suggestion not to worry is rather strange in the context: the federal constitution puts the task of stopping censorship in private businesses on private citizens, me (and you) included.
3. Actually, I live in California and California constitution protects my right of speech from private censorship too! It even works - if a private business is a shopping mall, eg. But it does not work for Google or Facebook. Because people do not think it's important. That means a piece of paper, even if it is named "constitution" can't protect the rights declared in it - if people stop thinking these rights are important. Why shouldn't I be worried - I have a "living experience" in a country with the right of free speech in the constitution only.
A clarification. 4. There were extremists on the site making calls to violence. Actually, at the moment of the de-platforming it was about "Russian propaganda". Some factual information was labelled "foreign propaganda" and censored. Again, I have and enormous "living experience" in the country with a permanent ban on "foreign propaganda".
A puzzle. 5. that is neither censorship as a society would consider it nor is it problematic.
My English is not that good but a dictionary tells me that:
cen·sorship
/ˈsensərSHip/
noun
1.
the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
prob·lem·at·ic
/ˌpräbləˈmadik/
adjective
constituting or presenting a problem or difficulty.
To consider this neither a censorship nor problematic you should change dictionaries first (probably you all are tired of my mentioning my "living experience", but yes, I have that one too).
1. First of all I didn’t care about Parler, it was a dump doomed to fail. Second this point is purely opinion. Third, your notion of what free speech is in this country is flawed. calls to commit violence and/or riot are not protected free speech under the constitution
2. I don’t care if you choose not to do business with AWS. My comment is on your opinions on whether what AWS did were legitimate.
3. Explain? How is a mall restricting you? Stores will kick you out for being loud and obstructive. It happens all the time without legal repercussion. Actually the government does protect the rights of Facebook, Google, etc to host content by users that are calls to violence, harm, abuse, etc. there are many examples of this. The constitution will never tell a company it has to do business with an entity that hosts that content though. That’s what’s crazy about the duality of free market ideologues. They want business to have free reign but then hate when they exercise it? I’m having a hard time trying to grasp what you’re getting at here, actually.
My point about censorship is in juxtaposition to government censorship which is what society should be worried about. If a business doesn’t want to do business with people who break the law that’s entirely up to them.
Thank you for directing me to that.
Must say, I see no correlation between the right to protest in a private establishment (that permits public access, a stipulation of the ruling) and the right to make calls to violence (which does not exist)
Edit: that last part should read: the right to make calls to violence in addition to the rights of private entities to choose to not do business with people for non-discriminatory reasons (discrimination based on protected statuses of individuals)
cen·sorship
/ˈsensərSHip/
noun
1.
the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
My trigger was not Russia, it was de-platforming of Parler. I kinda care more about my life in the US and consider political de-platforming an extremely dangerous development. A “trigger” caused by my “living experience” as my son interprets it (but I think it’s more logical than that).
Parler could have rented a building, bought servers, racked and stacked those servers, networked them and gotten connectivity to the world. They didn't, they leased servers as a service from others, and then got burned when those services decided they were uncomfortable with the vitriolic anonymous speech being hosted on their hardware.
Had they truly built their own platform, no one could have taken from them. (It'd be lots harder anyhow)
Right, but the point remains: AWS kicked Parler off of their platform. It's fine to be of the opinion that AWS was in the right to do this, but your comment seems entirely contradictory: Your first sentence claims they weren't deplatformed, the rest of your comment explains how Parler should have built their own platform from the ground up after getting kicked off of AWS's platform.
And if their office building evicted them, they still wouldn't have been deplatformed because they could still buy some land and build their own office; it was their own fault for leasing office space as a service and getting burned. And if their ISP cut their access, they still wouldn't have been deplatformed because they could still start their own ISP; had they truly built their own platform, no ISP could have taken that from them. And if the power plant wouldn't give them electricity- okay I'll stop.
There is a discussion to be had about what services should be available under common carrier or common carrier like terms, and what should not.
I'd argue that at least in the internet sphere, at least DNS, Access (either ISP or peering), and probably payments of some measure should be. I don't think PAAS systems ought to be, you can do without them, nor do I think hosted services (email, simple hosting, whatever) should be either.
We have an issue online where unfettered anonymous free speech is largely untenable in the current regulatory environment, I think that should be changed.
I also hold the view that unfettered anonymous free speech is broadly unworkable because it removes the feedback loop between speech and response to it - but that's a separate issue for society to work out, and shouldn't really be up to big corporations to fix (often poorly) on their own.
Anonymous speech is an essential facet of free speech- maybe the most important. Getting rid of anonymity means removing the voice of the trans woman stuck in a conservative town or in the year 2000- or the Satanist, the Muslim, the ex-con, the furry, or the BDSM enthusiast. It means making corporate whistleblowers put their livelihood on the line. It means telling John Fryer, the (at the time) anonymous gay psychiatrist who spoke out in 1972 against their treatment of gay people, to sit down and shut up. It means stopping the author of African Slavery in America (probably Thomas Paine, but left anonymous) from speaking out against slavery in 1775.
In another vein, Scott Alexander needed (partial) anonymity not to speak truth to power but to keep his patients from finding him, finding a disagreement, and treating him as an enemy. Even if it were just him in that situation, you'd be robbing me of books worth of philosophy, politics, and science- stuff that has made me a better person and a better thinker.
And you'd be removing me from this conversation, because I have friends and family across the political spectrum who I would prefer not to offend, and I have heterodox views that would upset the right with leftness and the left with rightness. Perhaps you think I should be prevented from speaking openly, but you certainly can't say it's because I am avoiding feedback- I'm seeking feedback for positions I would otherwise quietly go on believing.
What is the value added that would justify taking away the rights of so many powerless? Of suppressing any ideas that are not already mainstream?
I dont think you can or should get rid of anonymous free speech, but I that because of the nature of their platforms - the platforms publishing it have a right, if not obligation to exert editorial control.
I'm also fairly heterodox in my views (and queer on top of that) but when you have a random dude on a couch who can reach an audience of millions at the press of a button, the math changes - algorithmic amplification of hate, wingnuttery, etc - is a serious problem for the stability of democracy.
The issue isnt anonymous speech persay, that always has existed and should - it just used to cost something before, you had to have money for a printer, convince the printer to print your screed, distribute it widely enough to have an impact. Those costs lessened the impact, and reduced the societal risks.
Elsewhere on here, I proposed a federated karma system that extends the idea of community reputation (a norm in closed communities, like HN, Furry, etc) as a transparent replacement for direct editorial control, while still persisting anonymity.
I guess it's one of those things where I'm seeing a different reality from everyone else, but the notion that uncensored speech is the source of our present strife is one that I don't accept. I witnessed this series of events:
1. Early 2000s created a bunch of social media websites with free speech (then meaning protection from Christian-right censorship, which was the concern at the time) as a premise. These were fine places. There were occasional nutjobs and constant arguments, but people were generally comfortable participating. I argued with racists one day, communists the next, fascists, nazis. I developed a deeper understanding of my own beliefs on those issues. I argued against but was eventually convinced by drug legalization, trans rights, abortion rights- the list is long and embarrassing.
2. These websites saw an opportunity for growth, accelerated maybe by Facebook's IPO, but starting somewhere around the late 00s. The nutjobs and arguments were a turn-off to a potentially larger user base. So they drew a line in the sand, clefting the population into the would-be-censored and the would-not-be. The would-bes had to go express themselves somewhere else. If I wanted to argue with fringe people, I had to go into their echo chamber. It was not the place for me.
3. Opinions that were common on both sides in the 90s became opinions of the right only, and then became forbidden. The line in the sand moved leftwards. Little effort was made to convince anyone that these changes were good (I agree they were); mockery and 'educate yourself, bigot' became the norm. Extremism grew rapidly in both the de jure right-leaning spaces and the de facto left-leaning spaces, because the two groups had entered into feedback loops. Remaining holdouts were forced to move because expressing correlated viewpoints was now faux pas, and they faced guilt by association.
4. Sometime around 2015, people collectively decided that everything needed to be political all the time. This was a moral imperative. My apolitical communities were overrun by propagandists of one side or another (mostly the left, but I was on Reddit so that biases things). As Trump's campaign wore on, people concluded that the issue was not enough censorship, and added more.
5. The situation worsened, and COVID made 'misinformation' the new pro-censorship buzzword. More censorship was clearly the answer. Lab-leak theorists were suppressed and the Hunter Biden story was censored weeks before the election. Any remaining general public trust in the institutions responsible and their allies faded further. Election doubts festered the same way everything else had and we wound up with Jan 6.
6. More censorship?
7. Profit
That's just my personal experience, and I recognize that others see things differently. On top of that, fascism gained power a number of times through the 1900s, which was pre-internet, and often did so in censorious environments like Weimar Germany. Things like climate change denial and anti-vax both predate mainstream social media. All-in-all, blaming the lack of internet censorship for our polarization and extremism today falls very flat for me.
Setting all of that aside, it does not make sense to me that we should restrict human rights because some corporate algorithm amplifies hateful or extreme speech. Rewrite the damn algorithm.
I do like your federated karma system, and I have also thought about things like opt-in moderation (to enable opposing voices to occupy the same space comfortably) or a small limit on comments per user per day (to prevent things like 1% of twitter users write 80% of tweets, and encourage higher effort contributions). I don't think these solutions violate free speech, and they may produce better outcomes than 'don't censor'. But 'don't censor' would be a great start.
> I guess it's one of those things where I'm seeing a different reality from everyone else, but the notion that uncensored speech is the source of our present strife is one that I don't accept. I witnessed this series of events:
> 1. Early 2000s created a bunch of social media websites with free speech (then meaning protection from Christian-right censorship, which was the concern at the time) as a premise. These were fine places. There were occasional nutjobs and constant arguments, but people were generally comfortable participating. I argued with racists one day, communists the next, fascists, nazis. I developed a deeper understanding of my own beliefs on those issues. I argued against but was eventually convinced by drug legalization, trans rights, abortion rights- the list is long and embarrassing.
I started out towards the center, and remain towards the center, but because I'm not particularly lefty or conservative, I tend to hold a whole lot of heterodox opinions which makes the left consider me a conservative, and the right a lefty. I've had some look in convincing people to change their views though because of those heterodox views. I even wrote a substack about it.
> 2. These websites saw an opportunity for growth, accelerated maybe by Facebook's IPO, but starting somewhere around the late 00s. The nutjobs and arguments were a turn-off to a potentially larger user base. So they drew a line in the sand, clefting the population into the would-be-censored and the would-not-be. The would-bes had to go express themselves somewhere else. If I wanted to argue with fringe people, I had to go into their echo chamber. It was not the place for me.
See, I dont see it that way, it was the rise of algorithmic promotion of posts, and the need to monetize with advertising that caused the issue - they got embarrassed by racists or crazy ass shit going viral. The issue for me wasn't the censorship, it was that they algorithmically game the system to lift engagement every higher.
> 3. Opinions that were common on both sides in the 90s became opinions of the right only, and then became forbidden. The line in the sand moved leftwards. Little effort was made to convince anyone that these changes were good (I agree they were); mockery and 'educate yourself, bigot' became the norm. Extremism grew rapidly in both the de jure right-leaning spaces and the de facto left-leaning spaces, because the two groups had entered into feedback loops. Remaining holdouts were forced to move because expressing correlated viewpoints was now faux pas, and they faced guilt by association.
Right leaning spaces moved significantly further right as an anti-establishment backlash was unleashed. The lefties did move left, but not anywhere near as far left as the right have moved right. (and I had conservatives telling in in 2012 that dems had moved far far left over the last 8 years - and I couldn't see it, I did eventually start to see it around 2018, when I detected a drift left.)
> 4. Sometime around 2015, people collectively decided that everything needed to be political all the time. This was a moral imperative. My apolitical communities were overrun by propagandists of one side or another (mostly the left, but I was on Reddit so that biases things). As Trump's campaign wore on, people concluded that the issue was not enough censorship, and added more.
There was this point in 2012-2013 when I realized that everyone was angry all the time about basically everything all the time.
I didnt see the censorship start to crop up until 2018, 2019, most of it was silencing things that.. even by my free speech oriented perspective, was intended to incite violence. I will argue firmly as a centrist that the right's rhetoric by this point was firmly violent.
> 5. The situation worsened, and COVID made 'misinformation' the new pro-censorship buzzword. More censorship was clearly the answer. Lab-leak theorists were suppressed and the Hunter Biden story was cen...
My point is that all of those things would be deplatforming even though they could replace the platform themselves for more independence, which means the argument doesn't hold. Regardless of whether Amazon deplatformed, the distinction is not based on whether Parler could have built their own servers.
It depends on what your definition of "deplatforming" is but if it's so broad to count a twitter ban then "deplatforming" isn't very dangerous in general.
Only when it's not.
It's legal for AWS to have business with Russian entities.
It's illegal to have business with occupied territories (LNR/DPR in particular).
It's like You know. I have not suffered enough according to those sanctions. Lost a flat of my mother in my homeland. And now loss Amazon/IMBD accounts. Seems that I will be loosing my Google account soon.
> It appears a lot of my impulse buying was caused by my trust in Amazon return policy :)
Better to get it cheaper and less counterfeit/crappy the first time. Since delivery time from Amazon for non-Prime people has slowed to a crawl, it's a good motivator to discover best-in-class ecommerce sites rather than the mediocre-at-everything-but-sometimes-the-mediocre-thing-arrives-the-same-day-you-order-it site.
Sites that aren't paying the price of Amazon marketing, or charging an Amazon premium, so usually the prices are better. You might find that you usually use Amazon 95% of the time for just a few classes of product, and you're better served buying those from three other sites and leaving the last 5% of spontaneous purchases for which you don't have a good source with Amazon.
One gets the impression that the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing in big corporations like this. They have probably never had to call their own tech support.
It is easy to see how this could happen.
AWS Sanctions compliance team: ok, the government says we need to shut down Russian accounts, so we will lock any account using a Russian payment method. False positives can just call tech support to prove that they are not bots and have the offending payment method replaced.
Meanwhile over in support:
Boss: remember it is corporate policy that a CSR may not make any changes to billing information for a customer’s account after the stolen cards incident.
This is my experience too, I honestly believe that for anyone using twitter being permanently suspended is the best thing that can happen to them. It's just an awful place.
Spam, bots, fake stories, constant outrage. It's miserable but people seem to become addicted.
Twitter taught me to suppress the impulse to react with snark to things or share only negative opinions. The app does incite these compulsions in me, but I've realized over time it's not just Twitter, I could stand to be a nicer person in general. Since then I only let myself post on Twitter if I have something neutral or nice to say. I don't always succeed but I think I've legit grown thanks to this and by extension to Twitter, however sad that sounds. People have a point when they say Twitter is a toxic place in general, but as an individual user, you have all the power to make your Twitter circle whatever you want it to be. It doesn't have to be that way for you.
That is basically how I feel about my LinkedIn. Now I am actually working on a personal replacement of that online presence piece. Frankly, it was high time.
You're benefiting from a massive open, unpartitioned platform (meaning, anyone can join and form communities/reply-to tweets, without isolating things to friend-groups or creating 'subreddits' with human moderators gatekeeping them). The platform gives you unprecedented global reach, and most amazingly: it's still functional and hasn't been drowned in spam. I think people need to take a breath and realize that this is an incredible technical accomplishment in 2022 (or 2015, 2009, 2001) given the ambient noise level of the Internet. You are not going to keep a platform like this readable and still be able to apply loving, artisanal human decision-making to it: there aren't enough human beings in the world.
If you start a new account that behaves like spam, there's a good chance that you'll get treated like spam -- and that's probably an acceptable tradeoff because the alternative is no working platform at all.
to be fair, stripe has thousands of businesses and real money on the line. they are going to get some things wrong. My experience (in one of their target markets of b2b SaaS) has been flawless.
But Stripe should provide timelier service than Twitter precisely because there is real money on the line.
If Twitter suspends my account, I wouldn't expect much considering it's a free service with tens of millions more users than Stripe. They're definitely going to get more things wrong.
You can always get your own merchant account. Stripe is about being convenient since they don't due all the diligence of a bank when you sign up for a merchant account.
What are the practical alternatives? I'd imagine this is an issue one would see less often on a Mastodon node, as nodes tend to have fewer users per node so moderators / admins can respond more promptly to system failures, and if one doesn't like how an admin is running affairs, one can switch nodes.
I'm not sure what reasonable looks like when a system has 237 million daily active users and the reinstatement system itself would be intentionally gamed by adversaries.
Do we have any examples to draw from operating at that scale? Due to the Musk purchase, we have a rare public disclosure of a major tech giant's internal workings where Twitter claims (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/07/twitter-s...) it suspends half a million spam accounts a day. It's trivial to file an appeal, so (because the attackers are by no means disincentivized from appealing) that's probably on the order of 250,000 appeals a day if we assume even half the banned won't bother (and I think that assumption is low, since a reasonable system should probably make it trivial to file an appeal, therefore people will). How does one reasonably handle that? To scale up to thousands of humans handling it, you'd need strict rules to even approximate getting the same result across everyone, and if strict rules worked you could code them into the auto-ban system.
One solution might actually be "Stop having 'get every human being on the service' as a goal," but then sucks for the people who can't use the thing.
"We charge $100 to have a human look at this case, if the suspension was incorrect we reinstate the account and your money. If not, we tell you what actions you can take that would un-violate our policies so you could be re-instated."
Spammers doing selenium powered spam would never pay for that, but the real folks who are not tight with large audiences would have an option.
I believe there's meat on these bones. This is the approach some states in the US use for allowing challenge to election integrity if the vote count isn't narrow enough to automatically trigger a recount... A candidate who complains can put up the money to have an individual polling district recount the votes, and if the vote count comes out different enough to change the results, the money is refunded.
I can't imagine Twitter could get away with this without it being interpreted by the regulatory bodies of various countries as a protection racket. Which is unfortunate, because I think there's potential here.
Kinda agree, but small nitpick - $100 in places where most selenium scraping is done is a ton of money. To compare would average joe in US put 1k towards escrow?
> It's trivial to file an appeal, so (because the attackers are by no means disincentivized from appealing)
Well yeah, it's trivial to file an appeal if you just have to click a button, but obviously that's not what I was talking about. Have they tried literally anything else?
Solve difficult CAPTCHAs, send a scan of your passport, pay a small amount of money (e.g. $1), put a large amount of money in escrow like someone else suggested, allow other well-known accounts to vouch for you, etc. etc. etc.
There's a ton of things you could do. It seems like they've given up without trying any of them.
A federated system like Mastadon seems to be a good technical solution, but I think the more simple solution is to spend your valuable time on platforms that have better moderation, or invest in building your own website/platform.
The proposed solution is simple, but the problem has always been audience and discovery. Even if you managed to find a perfect platform with a decent userbase, you would still need to rely on people sharing links to your content on the more widely known platforms. Very rarely do people stumble upon blogs and niche social media sites.
I've played devil's advocate elsewhere in the thread, but this is such a petty and irrelevant kerfuffle, as far as Big-Tech-Censorship goes.
By Ben's own description of how the @StratecheryINT account was operated [0] -- i.e. "a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world." -- this is exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit that we'd want Twitter spam-detectors to cull with minimal time and resources.
Not only b/c of the obvious spam characteristics, but because it was a days-old account with few (if any) followers/followings. Even if it were a mistake, very little of value has been lost, since every tweet was the result of an automated script (i.e. simple to make a new account, and recreate the content that had thus far zero engagement).
Do people seriously think every such case -- an empty days-old account suddenly doing spam-like activity -- should be manually reviewed? That's a daily waste of human resources for tens of thousands (edit: actually it's millions [1]) of trivial permaban decisions -- exactly the kind of thing that an autoban algorithm can efficiently handle.
> For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.
I have the same sentiment, but with a different angle. Verified accounts like Thompson's get a lot of leeway with bending/breaking the rules before facing actual punishment. If a lesser known user deployed a selenium-twitter-spam-bot on AWS, it's possible both their spam bot and their real account would be permanently suspended
It doesn't have to be a lot of links, if you piss off the wrong people and they massreport you you're temporarily out.
You can reach out to support, but I don't know that support actually ever responds to any requests. Apparently according to posts on reddit if you add your number to twitter and something happens you won't even be able to ever remove it. Similarly they have weird intransparent policies regarding what numbers are allowed on twitter.
At the end of the day, most tech giants are unreachable. I hate to be that guy,but in a way it's kind of like the big chinese tech dystopia that all HN so adamantly complain about.
This episode demonstrates the foolishness of Twitter's prospective new owner.
He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam.
That's an instant contradiction, of course, because spam is perfectly legal under the US constitution.
And every attempt to eliminate spam and bots, whether human or automated, will necessarily sweep up many non-spam and non-bot accounts as false positives.
He could change it to a pay-to-play model where the payment is miniscule. It may not eliminate all spam, but I wouldn't be surprised if accounts have to go through a kyc payment mechanism in order to prove their identity.
It would eliminate multiple accounts per user, make all users known for wrongspeak prosecution, and largely cure the spam issue unless you're a well funded organization that can pay poor people to risk getting a lifetime ban to promote your spam.
A pay-per-Tweet scheme would reduce the total number of Tweets by 90% or more. We can all discuss whether that would be net-good or net-bad, but the vast majority of that reduction of speech would come from speech that is legal under the US constitution.
I think he means something like WhatsApp, which was 1 dollar per year in the beginning. But then again their model wouldn't work here either, because you could gift a 1 year membership to someone else. Given how much more valuable those bots are than 1 dollar per year, it would mean nothing to gift it to large amounts of people.
Similarly if you enforce it for everyone to pay for themselves, there would immediately be large parts of the world population that wouldn't be able to pay for it. Note that afford and be able to pay isn't the same thing. Which would turn it into the same western echo chamber they basically want it to be.
"It doesn't have to be a lot of links, if you piss off the wrong people and they massreport you you're temporarily out."
Or permanently. I once responded to an inane Kardashian tweet with a very dry restatement that she got famous for a boring porn tape and a father who got OJ Simpson off of a murder rap.
I was told that was "a threat" and perma-banned. 12 years of an account, spun into the void. I'd be angry but it's more embarrassing as an observation.
Twitter supports a usenet-on-acid model of bumrushing fan-bases on one side, and a long tail of bots and noise. It's truly strange how its become what it has.
I remember a day when WordPerfect employed thousands of local college students to staff top-notch help lines. They had what at the time was state-of-the-art phone queue management and tried very hard to minimize your wait time. If you needed help adjusting margins or creating footnotes, just call their support and they'll fix you up.
Can you imagine Google answering a phone call or a chat line to explain how to arrange bookmarks in Chrome? Ok, Chrome doesn't cost money, so maybe that's fair. How about Microsoft helping to move the taskbar back to the bottom of the screen? How about Samsung explaining how to set DoNotDisturb? Facebook walking you through how to recover from somebody taking over your account?
Removing it from the search results and unlinking its @handle in tweets from other accounts would have been enough, if it was spam, to prevent it from being shown at all to anyone.
If it’s useful for non-spam people who want to follow it from an offsite link, it’ll gain valid followers that can hint towards undoing its shadow ban over a long period of time — and by not doing follow activity of any sort in return, it’s clearly not playing the follow spam game in order to try and mask itself as anything other than a one-way feed account, so there’s no harm in letting active users follow it.
It just reads like Twitter isn’t able to distinguish how it treats RSS feeds from how it treats spambots, due solely to a limited stable of technical reactions.
u/lapcat accurately pointed out to me that a new account rapidly posting links is not likely "spam" by Twitter's definitions [0]. As I said in the reply, Ben hasn't yet posted the list of rules that Twitter says he allegedly broke.
> Do people seriously think every such case -- an empty days-old account suddenly doing spam-like activity -- should be manually reviewed?
The problem is not that the account triggered an algorithmic tripwire, but that the explanatory copy is a customer-hostile lie. It states in no uncertain terms that the suspension was further "carefully reviewed" to be found correct, and is also permanent. Obviously, it wasn't correct, and wasn't permanent.
I strongly suspect that, if there even was a human in the loop as the copy implies, they simply rubber-stamped the algorithmic flag. This is not necessarily the human's fault if their work is monitored/timed.
> The problem is not that the account triggered an algorithmic tripwire, but that the explanatory copy is a customer-hostile lie. It states in no uncertain terms that the suspension was further "carefully reviewed" to be found correct, and is also permanent. Obviously, it wasn't correct, and wasn't permanent.
"Permanently suspended" seems both accurate and helpful -- it doesn't mean that the account can't leave that state, but that unlike most other suspensions, the account will not be unsuspended after a set period of time. The note that Ben posted explicitly says "you can submit an appeal", which would imply to most people the possibility of reversion.
"Permanently suspended" is neither accurate nor helpful. That an account can't leave that state is precisely what "permanently" means. Since an appeal is possible, "Indefinitely suspended" would be accurate.
My Twitter account was suspended for "spam" a year ago because I kept replying to someone with the same reaction image. They reverted the suspension pretty quickly after I appealed.
I guess they handle appeals differently depending on the alleged infraction.
This is another power imbalance that is so frustrating. The account was “permanently suspended”, which you think means permanently suspended. But that only applies to normies. All the words are meaningless if twitter says otherwise. It’s really like living under a medieval king who is a law unto himself.
"Indefinitely suspended" might be better, but just "suspended" is probably going to be very confusing. In education, for example, "suspension" is a temporary ban, and "expulsion" is a permanent ban.
"All the words are meaningless if twitter says otherwise. It’s really like living under a medieval king who is a law unto himself."
That's every company policy, ultimately. C-Suites and the like exist partially to do "exception handling" (or for all y'all Papists out there, "special dispensations")
Permanently suspended means not temporarily suspended (for a few weeks etc). Everyone gets the ability to appeal. Whether the twitter kerfuffle affected the appeal process is another matter though.
Being pedantic indefinitely means "lasting for an unknown or unstated length of time", which kind of implies that the account will be unbanned at some point in the future. But I don't think there's an English word that conveys something will last for ever but could be stopped. Perhaps they should use "limited ban" for a temporary ban and "unlimited ban" for permanent or "permanent appealable ban".
I don’t get the ability to appeal. My Twitter account is permanently suspended and the appeals process is blocked for me. I have maybe tweeted once or twice years ago. I don’t get any explanation for why the appeals process doesn’t work for me or what’s wrong with my account.
Yeah completely matches my experience. Twitter banned my account for far less and unlike Ben, I dont have major presence or large audience. I wrote about my experience on the blog [0] so others can learn but what I learned is that there is an automated system to flag and automated system to respond to your questions and the later system rejects 99.99% of cases. You have to be in Ben's position to fall into that .01%
I was wondering why Twitter does not tell account owners what exactly violates their Twitter Rules. Isn't this exactly the same as the very censorship of those totalitarian countries: they tell you break some rules but they never tell you which rules, so you're forced to self censor, and they can interpret their rules however they like.
It is this kind of behavior that make me lose my trust with Twitter (or YouTube or FB, and etc).
Honest question: why would the account in question not be suspended after review by a human?
It's a new account that posted 75 tweets in less than 20 minutes, all linking to the same website, and with high-profile names in the title of the tweets.
This looks like spam to me, I would have banned it too.
I also know that the underpaid delivery person who marked "business already closed" on their app when they couldn’t find my apartment building entrance has to pick something to avoid getting paid less, that does not mean I’m not mad at the delivery company for creating the circumstances that resulted in them lying to me.
'permanently suspended' is weird in itself isn't it? Just avoiding the word 'banned' or similar.. but butchering other words into meaning the same thing?
That actually somewhat correct description of situation. Computer heuristic randomly banning users, with "careful review" not involving any humans or at least humans who care about results. They did make the system but afterwards it just does stuff by itself.
I think this is part of the super annoying to me trend of double speaking to avoid using overtly negative words.
“Banned” is a negative word so we don’t want to use that. But we still want to ban you, thus “permanently suspended.”
It’s not a new trend as “made redundant” (ie, fired) and “focusing on value” (ie, cancelled your project) are all over press releases and public communication.
I think it makes me feel worse than just using plain language as it takes me more effort to figure out the meaning so I’m also frustrated by the fakery in addition to whatever the negative message is. Makes the speaker and organization seem stupid.
Isn't suspended a negative word too? Maybe banned is too vague in that it could mean you had access now you don't OR you were never allowed access in the first place.
What I'm saying is "permanently suspended" isn't sugar coating what happened
You're right, they are the same, but they sound different, and kinda invoke different feelings when heard without a conscious effort to think about the meaning.
This is entirely subjective, but to me saying "Banned" is terse, rough, and firm. It spits out like a slap.
Being "suspended" is temporary. It sounds more gentle, less gruff. (Almost) all kids have been "suspended" from a sport or activity because of something that they did, but they were allowed to play again after a short period. The catch is the qualifier being "Permanently" changes it to being a Ban, but it doesn't sound that way at first.
Language is silly. You can say the same thing in very different ways that come across more or less negative, and I think that's the same as what's happening in the corporate veiled speech.
There's something I find literally evil about describing firing people as reducing the workforce, or rendering a position redundant, but I can't quite put why to words. It downplays human suffering to a degree that's almost unbelievable.
I think there's a subtle difference. A person is banned, but the account is permanently suspended. Trump himself was banned, and one of his accounts @realDonaladTrump was permanently suspended.
Fair point, but it's whether 'suspension' can be 'permanent' I was commenting on really, rather than that it ought to be 'banned' specifically. ('Disabled' perhaps when talking about the account, with the distinction you highlight.)
Spam (and scam) detection in social networks is hard. Yet it is fascinating how "random" suspensions like these (sometimes without recourse if you aren't famous or know the right people) feel like they come straight out of a dystopian sci-fi script.
> Spam (and scam) detection in social networks is hard.
Just a question.
What's the true harm in letting even obvious spammers spam as much as they want on their social media profiles? Let them waste their time. Social media is a bit different than a message board where everybody is burdened by any spam that's posted because you have to follow somebody intentionally to see their idiocy on social media. If somebody wants to post 100 ads for viagra a day on some dumb Twitter bot profile, who is actually going to follow them other than maybe other bots? You really only have to worry about cleaning up the search results to ensure that the spam is hidden from standard searches.
The only person who should be upset about random bot spam on social media is the advertiser that might have paid a lot of money for loads of low-quality ad impressions. Well, doesn't it follow that the advertising payment system and business model is the real issue here, not automating spam detection? Somewhere in the process, social media has to ensure that advertisers aren't paying for bot impressions. It's not necessarily the spam itself that's the real issue.
It's only hard if your business model is "growth & engagement" and you need to maximize user and engagement numbers at all costs.
If that's not your business model, abuse prevention is trivial. You can operate the network like a members' club where people gain privileges (such as posting links, media, etc - anything that can be used to spam or harm other users/the platform) over time as they prove themselves and acquire trust (Stack Overflow calls this number "reputation") and you can then use this trust number as a weight in automated decisions, so that high-trust users (who are unlikely to suddenly burn their hard-earned account) will not be impacted by an automated ban.
Forums in the good old days were ran by volunteers were able to deal with spam/abuse just fine with a combination of bans and privilege levels (it will take time & effort to level up an account to where it's able to post links/etc and be useful for spamming), there's absolutely no reason current social media companies can't do the same, if it wasn't for the fact that their business model to a certain extent relies on moderation being both unfair to users and subpar at effectively suppressing bad content (hint: bad content is nice to have around as long as it's not too visible, as it generates tons of outrage and thus engagement - it's only a problem when powerful people get wind of it and then you delete it and issue a fake apology).
StackOverflow and "forums in the good old days" are 1- way smaller than any of Twitter/FB/etc and 2- are mostly centered on one subject: it’s quite easy to remove abuse on SO because it’s about coding and anything else should be removed. On the other hand, Twitter/FB/etc have hundreds of millions of users posting all sorts of things. Moderation is a hard problem because it doesn’t scale.
There are ~21M questions on StackOverflow, which is equivalent to the number of tweets posted every a single hour and the number of items shared on Facebook every 8 minutes.
I wonder why is the ban permanent right off the bat?
To me it sounds reasonable to ban an alleged spam account for a limited period e.g. 24h - spammers won't bother waiting and will just create another account just like they normally do. An abandoned account can then be deleted.
Can anyone point out any obvious flaws in my reasoning?
Because spammers will just come back and use the account after 24 hours. They’re just using bots, so coding into it that you should come back to an account after 1 day is simple. They already have delays in postings to try and evade flood spam checks.
> I wonder why is the ban permanent right off the bat?
Because that’s simpler?
> spammers won't bother waiting and will just create another account just like they normally do
What makes you think they will not bother waiting 24h? If I were managing a spambots farm I guess I would rather wait 24h than go through the hassle of re-creating a Twitter account.
You could do both. Time is money, so you could create a new account and start spamming right away, and log back in to the old one after 24h to see if the suspension has been lifted.
I suspect this kind of problem is unavoidable when a large fraction of the world uses a centralized many-to-many communication platform. Moderation is always going to be a cost center for such a platform and there's a big gap between good enough moderation to prevent a mass exodus and what most of us would likely call good.
Using decentralized tools might improve the situation.
I think the problem is less that they temporarily banned his account, it's more that the language of the message was completely false. There was no "careful review", and it was not permanent.
Also, as others have pointed out, "suspension" implies that the interruption is temporary, so "permanently suspended" doesn't even make sense.
It just reads like generic corporate speak to me. All corporate decisions are "careful" and adverse actions have names that sound milder than they are.
If you wanted to suspend a user's account for a period of time you would say "suspended for two weeks". What if you wanted to suspend a user forever but it might have been a mistake or you might change your mind?
I think that just "suspended" would be more appropriate than "permanently suspended".
Although, it seems that the reality of the situation is closer to "your account is permanently banned unless you manage to raise enough fuss that an actual human looks at it."
It doesn't need to be centralized though, and I think centralization is the cause of both the moral problems (political bans, censorship, etc.) and the difficulties running these things.
Without centralization it's just some kind of trust network, and since the messages are open it's a much easier problem to filter away unwanted material than to deal with things like e-mail spam.
The reason people don't is simply that they want power over political discourse, so they accept what part of these problems are problems for them and are then happy for the other problems.
This is not true with decentralized services. If, for example, I have a Mastodon account and you want to follow me, we don't have to use the same service provider. You don't even have to use Mastodon software. You could use something else that speaks ActivityPub like Pixelfed or Friendica.
Competition, mostly. If users can shop around for different service providers or even self-host, the approach to moderation can be an important differentiator.
A better option is to legally require all web sites that provide third party distribution of content to hire actual human beings, with a livable wage, to moderate content rather than leaving it to users to target and report everything on their own. If they don't want to handle the cost of having a labor pool then they can go into some other sector like investment banking or whatever. Social media isn't a labor free sector of business.
I commented on a Fauci video where he said every1 will likely eventually be exposed to the virus. I said "and eventually we will all die" which was marked as misinformation and I was cancelled.
Personally, I think this might have been the right decision, though not for the reason given. If you remove accounts of people who frequently do not contribute anything useful to discussions, you'll get overall better discussions.
The same could be said for your contributions, and in my enlightened post-truth regime people like you would be the foundation of my new space program.
You would be enlisted (by force) to be the first astronauts to visit the sun.
What I said was true. I challenge any1 to say a more true statement. And I commented it bc he said "we'll all likely eventually be exposed to the virus". That isnt useful information.
You were obviously trolling and Fauci made a meaningful statement in the context. It's sad that you pretend to not see the difference in order not to lose face in front of a pseudonymous internet audience. You deserve to be more honest with yourself.
"Misleading Info Reporting Flow - Some of you can report Tweets for containing misinformation. This is currently available in limited testing to some people in Australia, Brazil, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain, and the US, though we are exploring how to expand. These reports are reviewed and acted on independently from other Tweet reporting flows (e.g. for abuse), as this test flow is used to inform our misinformation-related strategy and operations. "
Your comment was obviously sarcastic. It's wrong to say "Good, I'm glad your bad joke got you canceled". Speech being at the behest of bad AI is no excuse especially in something considered a platform. Twitter is a joke, their auto-moderation showcases how bad their current engineering is.
OT but just yesterday I finally decided to join Discord fad for some open-source communities, but my freshly created account got instantly disabled after successful validation with email and phone, that without sending any message. Unfortunately I don't own a second phone number to register another one.
I better stick with my veteran ways - IRC, mail-lists, forums. Matrix is on my list to check.
It's actually remarkable how many users discord has considering how difficult it is to register an account that's not instantly shadowbanned or disabled.
There is no consistency to any of it. Some people sign up using mainstream KYC email accounts like gmail, give their phone numbers, connect from their residential IP with the desktop client, and get instabanned. Other people, like myself, sign up with shady throwaway email accounts like cock.li, provide no phone number, only connect from VPN IPs with a browser, and don't get banned even after two years.
Update: I appealed and Discord just reenabled my account. They blamed antispam mechanisms. I guess it didn't like my Firefox with uBlock orgin as the other commenter mentioned.
I had a Discord account created in 2015 that I had always used with their Android app. Then one day I logged in with Firefox and boom, suddenly and permanently banned. I'm not sure what the lesson is here... maybe avoid uBlock and submit to the surveillance?
I've been using discord on actually all platforms and browsers out there with and without ad blockers and it was never an issue. Maybe some server you were in was hit with a blanket ban and the timing just coincided with you using FF?
And yeah, I have to agree. I absolutely hate it when providers (shipping companies are great at this) tell me obvious lies. Hey, I can handle issues and problems. What I can’t handle are lies.
I went through an entire ban appeal process with Electronic Arts over my Apex Legends account and was treated similarly.
According to one EA Forum Moderator, there are actual people reviewing appeals, but the fact that they upheld my ban saying it was correct only to revert it 2 weeks after I stopped fighting them tells me their process is flawed.
My best guess is bans are handed out automatically based on whatever heuristic, but the human review merely checks the log generated by the automated system for rudimentary errors. Was my account the one flagged and not a different user by mistake? Yes. Ban upheld. (except not, when they gave my account back with no apology)
This is indeed how it works at the first line. “Was my account banned in error” is answered by checking “yes right here in the logs it says your account was flagged for Foo.”
> I'm confused about what he means. "After careful review" means that a human double checked it right?
I think he's angry that didn't actually carefully review anything.
Which probably means "careful" is one of those words that sounds positive but is legally meaningless, so corporations will abuse it shamelessly for propaganda purposes.
Can we know for sure that they "didn't actually carefully review anything"? Likely thousands of accounts are auto-flagged every minute(second?), and for permanent suspension (as opposed to the much more common "locked because of suspicious automated activity/bad tweet"), maybe there's a process in which a report listing the suspicious signals is glanced at by a human auditor.
I'm talking like seconds of review, e.g. the report says "In 5 minute span, account tweeted from a known U.S. AWS server and a Europe AWS server, etc. etc. Confirm suspension", and the human clicks "Confirm" and moves on to the next hundred reports to "review"
> Can we know for sure that they "didn't actually carefully review anything"?
We can't, but that's part of the propaganda game.
> ...maybe there's a process in which a report listing the suspicious signals is glanced at by a human auditor.
> I'm talking like seconds of review, e.g. the report says "In 5 minute span, account tweeted from a known U.S. AWS server and a Europe AWS server, etc. etc. Confirm suspension", and the human clicks "Confirm" and moves on to the next hundred reports to "review"
That's actually a good example of not being careful.
> "After careful review" implies a human checked it. His beef is that it's quite unlikely a human actually reviewed it.
Not just that a human checked it, but a human carefully checked it. Humans are so often quick and/or sloppy that the word careful was needed even before the invention of computers.
Looking at the account, I don't see why it would be a lie in this case, or why the account shouldn't have been suspended after manual review. It posted 75 tweets in 26 minutes, self-admittedly "from multiple locations around the world.". All of those tweets link to an external website.
It's spam, so the account got suspended for posting spam. The fact that it was posted by Ben Thompson doesn't change the fact that it's spam. We can complain about automated moderation processes that make obvious mistakes all day, because it keeps happening, but this case doesn't look like an example of it.
The account did not violate Twitter rules in any way. It wasn't sending replies. It wasn't retweeting other accounts. It wasn't liking other accounts. It wasn't interacting with other accounts in any way. Should there be no accounts on Twitter that have a list of episodes of a program?
People follow these accounts because they want to be notified of new episodes. It's not spam, it's a service.
I tweet links to my blog posts on my Twitter account. Should I be suspended? What's wrong with external links?
In the thread, Ben alluded to automated, possibly distributed activity:
> For the record, this is a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world.
It seems obvious that the tweets were automated -- during some periods, it tweeted every ~10 seconds. If it were switching IPs at that same rate, especially if the IPs were in known AWS/Azure/etc ranges, then it's obviously not going to be authentic human activity.
In your personal situation, even if you had IP changes between every tweet -- I assume your account has some tenure, and is more than just a few days old? Twitter keeps track of all the IPs you've ever logged in from, and for older known accounts, there's probably more tolerance for weird activity (e.g. bouncing between VPNs) than a days-old account that has done nothing but suspicious spam.
> there's probably more tolerance for weird activity
Well, my Twitter account has been suspended at least 4 times for dumb reasons or no apparent reason at all.
> nothing but suspicious spam
It was not spam. Tweeting is not spam. Tweeting a lot is not even spam. Unsolicited replies, for example, can be spam. Ben's account did not interact with anyone. There was no unsolicited interaction whatsoever.
Twitter has an "automation rules" [0] page which does indeed affirm that users are allowed to post "automated Tweets based on sources of outside information, such as an RSS feed, weather data, etc". But you're right, "spammy" isn't the right word since on the automation rules page and elsewhere, spam is generally understood by Twitter to be unsolicited interaction.
But the point is moot for now since Ben (AFAIK) hasn't posted any more details about the suspension note. IIRC, the suspension email is supposed to list the alleged violations, and I don't think Ben has tweeted a screenshot of that email. [1]
daringfireball has 30 tweets in the last 10 days. It's also a 15 year old account with 100k followers. It seems unlikely that any remotely competent spam detection algorithm or human review process would suspect it of being spam.
This is missing the point, which is "The account did not violate Twitter rules in any way."
If Gruber's accounts are not spam, then Thompson's account is not spam either. The age of the account and other statistics are irrelevant, because the same rules ought to apply to everyone.
I think it ought to be uncontroversial that an account shouldn't be suspended if it hasn't violated the rules, but somehow many people in this thread are defending the punishment of the innocent.
There's actually no rule against bots on Twitter. In fact there are some accounts now explicitly labeled "Automated". The goal ought to be not "detecting bots" but rather "detecting rule violations".
I'm not all that concerned with what Twitter's rules supposedly are. If the only complaint here is that Twitter should be more clear about their rules and/or more consistent in enforcing them, then sure, I can agree with that (although there are obvious reasons why you shouldn't be completely clear about what your exact thresholds are for spam detection).
I'm just talking about what I think looks clearly like spam, and what I think reasonable spam policies would look like. That whole Twitter thread of accusations has now been deleted, so I'm not necessarily addressing the exact text of it. I'm just saying that one of those posting patterns looks very clearly like spam and the other very clearly does not appear to be spam.
It’s all about age of the account, number of followers, and rate and origin of the automated tweets. Perhaps a way to think about it is to ask, if there was a new account created just to have a bot spam out links at a high rate, how would it look different than this account?
> if there was a new account created just to have a bot spam out links at a high rate, how would it look different than this account?
I think we differ on the definition of "spam".
Tweeting links on your own profile is not spam. Tweeting links in replies to other users can be spam. Ben's account was not replying at all, just tweeting in its own profile. A Twitter user would generally only see those tweets if they followed Ben's account. The was no unsolicited pushing.
I agree, and think we should remember that many Twitter users have chronological feeds. While I'm sure it was unintended, followers of @stratecheryint would find their feed unusable for the duration of the mistaken spamming.
"Permanent" is harsh. Maybe a couple hours of cooldown and a "did you mean to start a thread or post these hourly?" message would be a nice alternative.
Can't wait for the AI to replace middle management, like the other link from the front-page claimed will happen. I can finally get fired by some black box algorithm so no one has to take responsibility.
It has already, and long ago. It's just not very intelligent. Have you had any serious (non-routine) dealings with a bank or phone co. lately? Nobody you can talk to has any agency, any authority to do anything other than what the algorithm (which includes their internal rules, guidelines, etc.) tells them to do.
I'm a big fan of Ben Thompson, and I'm not necessarily on Twitter's side here, but this to me seems more like a case of Ben whining about "Spam is when someone else sends it".
From his own words, this "Stratechery Interviews" account was a new account that only sent out tweets of links from multiple locations around the world. In other words, the only thing really distinguishing it from spam on a technical level is that Ben liked the content it was tweeting about.
Sure, I'd be annoyed too, but Ben's rage tweets just show to me that even the most rational among us become emotional when we don't get something want.
It's important to note that the suspended account didn't send any replies, or even retweet or like any other accounts. Presumably it didn't send any unsolicited DMs either.
The account was not harming or annoying anyone. Does it even qualify as "spam"?
My $.02, he's raging not about losing something that he wants, but instead about the double-standard. If this account posting links is getting banned, why is it that Twitter seems so hell bent on leaving all the fake Elon accounts that are spamming people to get free crypto?
> new account that only sent out tweets of links from multiple locations around the world.
> In other words, the only thing really distinguishing it from spam on a technical level is that Ben liked the content it was tweeting about.
I guess the issue is that these conditions alone are now enough to warrant a ban 'on a technical level', when a few years accounts like that existed with no issue. Spam's a huge issue on Twitter, no doubt, but it seems like things are getting worse and it's fair to ask for some accountability.
I don’t think you’re familiar with this use of Twitter. Since accounts can’t easily be partially followed by certain keywords or hashtags, creators will create additional accounts as notification channels for some of their content that their audience can choose to follow. It’s not spam because the delivery is wanted by those following the account. These channels don’t try to engage accounts that are uninterested in them.
Is that useful account hard to disambiguate from a spam account? Yes, but that’s Twitter’s job here.
Look at email. People get tons of notification-only email that are little more than links. Email providers simply have to figure out how to block spam without blocking legitimate email, and they largely have. Social has the same obligation.
He also provides RSS feeds. The Twitter feed is a convenience. Reducing the demand for Twitter notifications is beyond the ability of creators/publishers.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. Twitter had RSS support and killed it about a decade ago in pursuit of their strategy to grow by hurting the third party ecosystem that had grown around Twitter. I still find that decision to be disappointing.
Some RSS readers support following Twitter accounts, but they use the third party app API. I personally follow Twitter accounts in NewsBlur.
New account. So? People create new accounts all the time. How do accounts come into existence?
Tweeting out links. So? One of the most basic use cases there are, for example a brand tweeting links to press releases.
From multiple locations. So? You mean like every multinational?
None of these factors have any smoking gun indicator to decisively and permanently suspend an account. On the other end of the spectrum we have a zillion crypto bots having the exact same avatar, name variations, auto-tweeting within the second of a main tweet being posted, and this is not spam.
This is faulty analysis. Of course not any single one of these things by itself would indicate spam, but a yes, a brand new account that only tweets links, from multinational locations, would probably be spam the vast, vast majority of the time.
The problem is the word "probably". There's no smoking gun, just an increased likelihood. Yet a very definitive conclusion is made prematurely.
Even if you find such entity "spamming" links, it still doesn't meet the more traditional definition of spam. Said account does not notify anybody, does not comment, direct message, it's just self-spamming.
It also goes to show that much of what passes for "reasoned, non-emotional discourse" on HN can be written by people that don't always hold true to that stance when stuff they care about is affected.
Ben Thomson should hire somebody to run his social media. Admin work of any kind will comes with hassles. A tech thought leader writing so childishly over a hiccup makes me question the value of his insights. But then I was never really sold on his writing to begin with, as it's a little too Economist-y. Nicely written, 30k ft view stuff for the managerial classes.
Other than cyber-utopian hype, social media sales pitches, and the human love for "a deal too good to be true...while it lasts", is there any reason to expect competent, reliable customer service from any large social media company which is based on free accounts? Let alone a company which shows ~no evidence of being able to break even (financially, over time)?
If you’re struggling with account suspensions, you can ask around in telegram. You can hire people from India to create a new account for a few dollars for you.
Facebook (the social app) and Google (Ads, Play Store, etc) are no different. I’ve read countless accounts from many individuals and small/independent app developers about their accounts being suspended or terminated with little to no means of redressal.
I will go on to say that this remains a generally unsolved problem for companies working at scale that are under scrutiny and dealing with financial or social fraud. They are willing to accept false negatives instead of false positives.
I worked in an organization that prided itself with great customer service, and they did deliver. The cost of doing so (resolving each case manually, often giving benefit to the customer) is significant.
Amazon is another prime example of a company that does customer service well - though that might have some consequences on their work culture (mistakes are not easily forgiven - since the cost is so high). Not an apples to apples comparison though, Twitter is ad based (much higher volume/users needed for revenue) unlike Amazon.
More users = more challenges with the same level of staff. That’s how you end up with a cheap processes (lots of automation, outsourced reviews) designed to handle 90% cases vs. an expensive/more thorough process (manual checks by experts along the way) that can handle 99% cases.
> Amazon is another prime example of a company that does customer service well - though that might have some consequences on their work culture (mistakes are not easily forgiven - since the cost is so high).
Certainly not. In fact they have one of the most incompetent customer services. When I changed my bank account, they didn't change my bank account, but rather created a new user with the new bank data. Then when I asked them to remove the old wrong account, they were very nice confirming that they will do that. But instead they deleted my new account, with only the old account remaining. When complaining about that they ignored it, so I just deleted my old account also, and am a happy non-Amazon customer since.
I'm sure there are counter-examples, but Amazon generally do have quite good customer service. When I've had a problem with a delivery I've been amazed to be able to contact a human quite quickly and have them investigate. Just being able to talk to a human is startling compared to certain other tech behemoths.
The Joe Rogan podcast with Vijaya Gadde, Jack Dorsey and Tim Pool gives the outside world a good look at how Twitter is run. They should have been able to wipe the floor with every concern that was raised. Instead Jack Dorsey comes off looking lost and Vijaya Gadde comes off looking like a bad lawyer.
Not surprising, Dorsey has tried his hardest to pretend that Twitter isn't his baby for several years. He'd much rather be thought of as a payments guy (Square) crossed with bitcoin shaman.
On HN, shadowbanning (i.e. banning accounts without telling them) is nearly always for accounts that don't have much posting history—either spam accounts or ones that show signs of having abused HN in the past, such as serial trolls. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040389 has links back to a bunch of longer explanations, if anyone wants more.
p.s. After a quick look, I'd say HN's system is working reasonably well in your case because most of your good comments are getting vouched for by users, which unkills them, and most of your bad (for HN) comments are rightfully staying killed. There are cases of banned accounts that shouldn't stay banned, but this isn't one of them.
Using the web and it's services really feels more and more like tedious work which is simply not worth it anymore. I don't want to sound like some old grunt (not even 30 yet), but every modern service uses some kind of automatic banning system and everything you invested can be gone in seconds.
To spice things up, all these services also stopped providing any kind of support regarding these kind of problems. Ever tried to get into contact with anybody about a banned account?
Just some weeks ago Discord decided to ban my 6 year old account out of nowhere. I didn't used Discord for 4 weeks, since I was on vacation. Also I am pretty sure, that it wasn't hacked, because I used MFA and no other account was affected.
I tried to contact the support, but only got a template response, that they don't talk about reasons and my account data will also be deleted in 14 days. I tried to contact them again, but they simply blocked my mail after that.
I didn't do any suspicious on discord ever. So I really had no clue why this happened. While talking with friends and coworker I've heard similar stories. And everybody of us changed their hardware multiple times beforehand (for example to test a specific component or for overclocking). Gotta love automatic banning systems...
Last year, some idiot opened a bank account in my name. I was lucky to find out - I tried to get in touch with the bank. Zero human contact - the only way to communicate with them is via email. No phones, no chat, no in-person - nothing. Just email. Ultimately they closed the account (at least they claim they did). If this is the situation in a highly regulated (supposedly?) industry like banking, then how can we expect social media companies to fare any better?
I don't know what the solution is. I don't use social media (except HN, I don't know if it falls under social media category) and I don't feel the need to. It is super easy to not use Facebook, Twitter etc. But I have to use banks, insurance etc - there is no way to vote with wallet there, as almost every bank is as bad as the next one. I know of at least one college who post their class schedule, events etc only on Facebook, forcing their students to have a FB account. The level of stupidity...
I agree, it's a huge problem. Generally for services that are "free" - I highly recommend finding alternatives for anything you consider important, either paying for it or running it yourself.
FastMail works wonderfully for me, and I self-host Mastodon for myself and Synapse(Matrix) for communicating with my family.
I don't ever want to be trapped in a Kafka-esque trial by corporate automation!
397 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadFor the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.
The problem at its core is that Twitter refuses to hire appropriate levels of moderation staff for the scale it has, and that it does nothing against raid instigators. Reddit at least has subreddit mods take care of most of the bullshit and at least the large subreddit mods have direct connections to Reddit, and Reddit itself fights back against communities that "raid" other subs, but even there it's common experience on subreddits like TwoX that women get reported to the Reddit Suicide Alert.
Twitter however? Good luck if you're not in Germany where you can file for emergency civil injunctions against Twitter in the case of wrongful bans (Twitter and FB both learned the hard way to not ignore these) or have friends in media that can amplify your shitstorm. Twitter moderation teams only act on reports, they unlike Reddit don't seem to have any staff dedicated to monitoring sentiments and trends to detect abusive behavior.
Anyways people use it all the time in every single sub for any unrelated thing, just because they hate you, downvoting is not enough, trolling etc. In sport subs it's very common to report opposing fans with this option for example
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/4/21164687/reddit-new-suicid...
On some subreddits every other post will be reported like this.
Meanwhile, Reddit tends to do very little about reports of even direct violence threats ala "I will find you and I will kill your children" etc. which are frequently found to "not be in violation of the terms of service".
The bot moderation conundrum is a wholly second moderation question layered on top of the first. How do Twitter accounts map onto human bodies? Is it 1:1, like government ids? 1:many so brands can have accounts? many:1 so humans can amplify their voice? Until this is answered all moderation actions taken in the name of 'bot policy' is capricious. As is the assignment of blue checkmarks.
Reddit struggles with these same problems at website-scale, where moderation must work across subreddits. They only appear to have a better solution because some topics at subreddit-scale make enough of the questions I raise irrelevant that you can install a goon and have them moderate via edict. Just like chat rooms and message boards did in the old days. To make that point a little clearer: you can be off-topic in a subreddit or an Orange Site thread, but you can't be off-topic anywhere on Twitter.
If someone (or 10k someones) watches and compiles quality items of interest, maybe i want one of those feeds INSTEAD of Twitter’s ML algorithm.
Twitter can still monetize but now curations could monetize individually via including specific ad tweets.
And i want to subscribe to multiple curations, not just one.
Twitter could even have their own ML algorithm as a curation but I want it to be explicit opt in.
You could browse curations by popularity or topic and opt in to the ones you like, or opt out if you don’t like one anymore.
Trolls wouldn’t get included in curations that anyone cared about.
The down side is that it magnifies the social media echo chamber effect, but it also makes everyone’s feed more personally relevant.
For an idea of what it looks like in practice, these are my feeds on software development[2] and capitalism[3]. Interested in one but not the other? No problem, ignore the capitalism feed and just sub to the software development feed; you don't have to be hit by a train of all of my thoughts on every little topic by subscribing to an all-encompassing feed.
I'm currently working on a piece around feed discoverability that will integrate RSS subscription stats in few interesting late 90s/early 00s-web ways.
[1]: https://notado.app
[2]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/software-development
[3]: https://notado.app/feeds/jado/capitalism
That’s a nice idea, but needs just one step done before: moderation should be placed in the each user’s hands.
I need my own filter about what I see. Like:
1. I always want to read A.
2. I always want to read B, but not when he is talking to C.
3. Show me some random people from time to time, like 3 per day.
And we can share our own “filters”, that creates opt-in curation.
Echo-chamber is indeed a problem, hence rule 3. Also I hope for rule 1 to find people who talk to their opponents meaningfully. But if a person wants to stay in an echo-chamber - she can. I just to not want to be forced into someone else’s echo-chamber.
If you mean it doesn't exist, that's arguable. If you mean it can't exist, that's nonsense. Just imagine for a second that moderation made money somehow. Boom! A moderation force that can take on planets full of new people. Tech companies are just cheap when it comes to dealing with end users. There is no obstacle but money to them creating capable moderation or customer support. It's a choice (to put profit first.)
Well, perhaps you can, if you limit the discussion so that you can't discuss borders of countries, existence of certain countries, rights of certain groups, existence of certain groups, self-identity of many of your users, politicians, politics, religion and a bunch of other topics. If you ban all of these and permit just posting what you had for lunch, then perhaps you can make an universal moderation standard - but I would not call it "appropriate moderation" anymore.
Haven't Wikipedia and Stack Overflow figured out the right way to moderate at scale?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_writes_Wikipedia...
But you have to read all 829 M to find the abusive ones—and you have to agree on what 'abusive' means.
Right now Twitter isn't doing anything but the first part, which is why "I got mass report banned on Twitter" stories are so commonplace. They need not be, if Twitter would do their goddamn job.
At some point, in designing the algorithms, in instructing the human reviewers, and so on, you still need to agree on what abusive means. So there's no way around that.
As to the volume, I agree, one can deploy algorithms as a first filtering step. In this case, I don't usually trust humans to be smarter than algorithms, but I do trust humans to be better at abuse than algorithms are at recognising it—unless the algorithms have so many false positives that they're barely filtering at all.
I'm likely in the minority on this, but I'd rather have the control than trust others to moderate in my best interests for me.
I think their different goals make it easier (which is not to say easy!) to figure out an appropriate moderation style. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; it is easier to impose norms on an encyclopedia than a social platform. I don't have such a pithy summary of what SO is, but, as basically a knowledge repository rather than a social platform, it, too, can afford to impose certain norms that would stifle a social space. And yet, even with this head start, they can still face considerable flare-ups of controversy!
Not sure about that. It's just more expensive than Twitter can afford. Same for Facebook and YouTube.
I don't believe that anyone could moderate at Twitter's scale. More than 500 million tweets are published per day. How do you moderate that? It's like bringing an umbrella to a tsunami.
Not to mention, Reddit moderation is crap. I've tried to use Reddit several times but gave up each time, because my innocent comments — mainly writing technical help — were getting moderated. I wasn't writing anything political; I couldn't even post on r/apple! They still use a lot of automation on Reddit in the bigger subreddits.
Twitter doesn't make enough revenue to hire enough people to do that intelligently.
You can't operate a chemical factory without paying for adequate measures to prevent spewing toxic waste into common resources like air and water, so why should you be allowed to run a facility that spews toxic hate into societies without establishing adequate protection?!
If there is one thing that made the internet so toxic, it was services labeled as "free" that in reality were nothing more than avenues for advertisers to shove ads down our throats, with the cost being our societies breaking apart as a result of all the lone village nutcases suddenly unifying themselves and no one paying for the virtual equivalent of the police to make sure the nutcases don't create chaos.
I think they're trying. ;-)
To be clear, I'm not defending Twitter. If I was in charge, I would actually shut down Twitter for the benefit of the world. My point is just the basic financial fact that Twitter doesn't have enough money to do this, and thus they won't, indeed can't.
To cite a particularly egregious example, I once saw a person banned for "giving medical advice" on /r/adhd, while not one, but multiple other moderators had also given medical advice in the exact same thread. A thread that was explicitly asking for medical advice.
Are there actual cases (plural)? I only know one lawyer and one case where that happened and was decided by the BGH (federal court).
Get off Twitter. Even better, turn off that TV.
And of course the "purple app" that everyone is talking about (https://www.farcaster.xyz/) is incredible.
Which is a surprise right? Given how popular it is on HN:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
On the positive side, internet has given us access to a lot of valuable information (for those who seek it out), whereas TV only makes available what the media companies want you to have access to.
"Telephone is more detrimental to humans than radio ever was."
"Radio is more detrimental to humans than telegraph ever was."
I do think a case could be made that the changes in communication driven by the internet actually are different, but it's not the change itself, per se, as much as the speed of change. Pre-internet these changes were generational, and they generally took a generation (or more!) to be fully adopted and integrated into society. Now they're coming every decade or less, sweeping through the world in a matter of years.
A quick Google search will show that they did in fact say these things about the telephone and telegraph
> In 1858, People Said the Telegraph Was 'Too Fast for the Truth'
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/in-18...
> “The telephone is the instrument of the devil”
https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/history/communication/h...
They weren't as enthusiastic on January 6th, 2021. That was Twitter-led too.
Once social media replaced bookmarks, people went there to find new links. And eventually, when SM de-ranked posts with external links, more and more of the feed became about exclusively in-app material, which was echo chambers and arguments and abuse.
???
Justin Hall's call to arms "HTML is easy as hell"[0] was written nearly 30 years ago. The cycle Hall promoted is non-centralized, noncommercial and read-write.
0. http://www.links.net/webpub/
If you're running a business, you most likely need to meet people where they are at. Sometimes, your target audience are mostly on Facebook, then you most likely need to be at Facebook in order to reach them. Sometimes they are on Twitter, then you need to be there. Other times, you're doing something completely different, like running a restaurant, then you need to be visible on Google Maps/Tripadvisor, otherwise you'll lose out on ton of business.
It's really hard to just start a business without having any place for finding users for it, and sometimes the best place is Twitter but you're shit out of luck if you get banned...
Wow, that's a depressing thought.
I think I'd prefer to find a different line of business, if it were me.
If your customers are somewhere, you could be there too, and that often has the least amount of friction or is the easiest choice, so it's understandable why so many people elect to do it. But another thing you could do is bring them to where you are.
Most people who run businesses opt for meeting people where they already are though.
It's almost every line of business. You probably need a mildly active twitter/facebook/instagram presence if you have a nice nail salon, or toy store. Anything not in a huge popular franchise.
edit: this sentiment puts me in mind of a watch or shoe repair shop guy in the 1960s who refuses to install a telephone because he wouldn't want customers who think that they could just loudly barge into whatever he was doing at will. Telephone culture brings a sense of unearned entitlement that attracts bad people. But you miss out on business worth far more than the irritation without a telephone. Keep the telephone outside the actual shop and hire someone else to answer it. They used to call answering machines "phone butlers."
I really wouldn't want those people as customers. Really. You get enough toxic customers through organic acquisition.
Hint: I am not alone in this.
The trick is not to have a smart phone. When I'm coding I can pop in and out of Twitter. But then when I close the lid I'm unplugged.
So it seems like people should know at least what got them banned.
I have a friend who is a minor public figure who gets taken down this way regularly.
The result is people get banned without objectively looking at the reasons.
That said I also know Twitter has quite odd rules about where it takes hardlines.
Anyway if that's a pattern it might have something to do with that.
That sounds like an amazing way to become slower and worse at programming...
I'm not going to say it was life changing, but it is stress that is now gone. Would highly recommend to anyone that has higher stress levels, it's possible SOME of it is coming from your social media use. In my case, it was work that was the big cause, but, removing myself from social media resulted in a noticeable improvement.
I think part of the problem is that people don't realize that a lot of what they are doing is contributing to their own stress.
Even if the discussion is friendly, once you've said your piece, it is usually best to let others reply. The discussion gets better the more unique perspectives are in it.
Same goes for meetings, ideally.
Easier said than done, especially when a reply criticizes you, but this is probably right. I've greatly regretted many HN back-and-forth exchanges. It almost never ends well.
You mean like how OP decided not to do business with Amazon?
> What you’re worried about is governmental action and is not equivalent here.
My kids tried to point me in the same direction. I’ve just pointed them to the router and said: I am a private citizen paying for Internet connection in this house. In 24 hours this router will be configured to drop all connections to Amazon, Facebook and Twitter. Prepare yourself.
Boy, how worried they were. Never seen any person more worried in my life. See, they use Facebook for studies and Amazon for buying textbooks, so why I am so cruel?
I said: exactly my point. I was not that cruel though, but probably I should have.
They're both not government action, but they're very different kinds. There's a huge difference between "I will not assist this entity" and "I will stop other people from assisting this entity".
Along similar lines, I am deeply upset with the level of power that payment processors have/use around censorship. But I don't care too much what AWS does.
On one hand - exactly! This is why I hate that Amazon stops me from using Parler, instead of not using it itself.
On other hand - my kids faced much less obstacles than Parler:
1. They are adults, they could have purchased their own internet connection.
2. They are Russians, they know how to use VPN. Theoretically .
They are just busy people, they could have coped, but would have some extra unnecessary troubles to overcome. And just a possibility of these small extra troubles caused a lot of worrying. (Parler failed to cope, they were too reliant on Amazon services or something, so unprofessional).
You have twisted what I said past the breaking point. Amazon didn't stop anyone else from hosting or accessing Parler. They only refused to assist it themselves.
> they know how to use VPN.
Oh if VPN is allowed then it's significantly less of a problem. But you're still blocking it on the main network in a way that goes significantly beyond what Amazon did.
Infrastructure should not block. I don't feel like AWS is monopolistic enough to count as infrastructure.
How is taking money from me is assisting me? Amazon was not financing Parler, no providing it any discount, afaik. Me - I was assisting my kids by providing them Internet for free. Want Facebook? Pay for it yourselves.
>But you're still blocking it on the main network in a way that goes significantly beyond what Amazon did.
What is the "main network"? What I was blocking exactly? Call a provider, schedule an appointment, buy a WiFi switch... Yes, you could have missed an assignment or two, but nothing was blocked.
Exactly like Parler - it eventually coped and moved, just missed that "laptop story" bandwagon.
>I don't feel like AWS is monopolistic enough to count as infrastructure.
I think it is, I think it is. Even more worrying (to me) - Amazon participated in a coordinated shutdown of Parler on app stores and hosting sites. That was definitely an abuse of my money they "assisted" me by taking it, so they are not getting it anymore. An attitude recommended to everybody.
Getting paid to provide a service is still providing a service. If you don't like the word "assist" then whatever pick your own word. There's so many server providers that I don't think any of them should be obligated to do business. But ISPs and payment processors should be obligated, in my opinion.
> Me - I was assisting my kids by providing them Internet for free. Want Facebook? Pay for it yourselves.
> What is the "main network"? What I was blocking exactly? Call a provider, schedule an appointment, buy a WiFi switch... Yes, you could have missed an assignment or two, but nothing was blocked.
This part is a bit complicated when we're talking about all adults, but normally the head of household is in charge of the utilities and other people aren't expected to get their own. So that makes it the main network. If you want to filter the network in this situation, it's not unjustified, but you're definitely standing in between the two parties rather than refusing to interact yourself.
> Even more worrying (to me) - Amazon participated in a coordinated shutdown of Parler on app stores and hosting sites.
The app store takedowns are significantly less appropriate than Amazon's shutdown given their monopoly power.
Extremists on Twitter often make calls to violence too. Why do we let Twitter stay online and just ban those individuals instead of kicking Twitter offline?
Amazon sees fit to sell innumerable books by extremists which call to violence. Particularly, but not only, many famous religious texts and political manifestos.
Railroad period in California politics. About 187x or so.
The (only) transcontinental railroad is completed. The owners, Stanford (yes, that Stanford) and Co see the enormous economic power in their hands. They can set tariffs as they please. If a farm is owned by a relative or a loyal person - shipping oranges to Chicago is extremely profitable. A "bad" person gets a prohibiting tariff. So, only a loyal person can be elected at any post. Only a loyal person can own a (profitable) newspaper.
This continues for a couple dozen years, then there is a popular revolt and no railroad-connected person can ever be elected anywhere. And the first anti-monopoly laws are introduced. Suddenly a private business can't set private tariffs as it's pleased.
"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun."
-- Having said that, the post you agree with is flawed on much simpler basis. The constitution protects us from government censorship. Protection from private censorship (and yes, it's a censorship) is placed in our own private hands. So to say "nothing to worry about" is extremely counter-productive. Exactly because there is no other recourse except the private action of stopping dealing with a business that engages is censorship.
1. There were bad people on the site, whom other people (you included) wanted to shut up. The site refused to do so. This speaks to the quality of the site, no? They refused to censor something while there was a strong push to censor it - that means they will probably not censor you, when your opinion will differ from the opinion of powerful people. That means that a person should rather support the site that does not censor opinions the person does not agree with.
Unless the person hopes to always agree with the opinions of the powerful people even when the powerful opinions change.
2. The logic of the federal constitution prohibiting only Congress to pass censorship laws, as far as I get it was: if a business indulges in censorship, customers can drop it and go to its competition. That's exactly what I am doing - defending the American way of life one less purchase on Amazon at a time. Suggestion not to worry is rather strange in the context: the federal constitution puts the task of stopping censorship in private businesses on private citizens, me (and you) included.
3. Actually, I live in California and California constitution protects my right of speech from private censorship too! It even works - if a private business is a shopping mall, eg. But it does not work for Google or Facebook. Because people do not think it's important. That means a piece of paper, even if it is named "constitution" can't protect the rights declared in it - if people stop thinking these rights are important. Why shouldn't I be worried - I have a "living experience" in a country with the right of free speech in the constitution only.
A clarification. 4. There were extremists on the site making calls to violence. Actually, at the moment of the de-platforming it was about "Russian propaganda". Some factual information was labelled "foreign propaganda" and censored. Again, I have and enormous "living experience" in the country with a permanent ban on "foreign propaganda".
A puzzle. 5. that is neither censorship as a society would consider it nor is it problematic.
My English is not that good but a dictionary tells me that:
cen·sorship /ˈsensərSHip/ noun 1. the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
prob·lem·at·ic /ˌpräbləˈmadik/ adjective constituting or presenting a problem or difficulty.
To consider this neither a censorship nor problematic you should change dictionaries first (probably you all are tired of my mentioning my "living experience", but yes, I have that one too).
2. I don’t care if you choose not to do business with AWS. My comment is on your opinions on whether what AWS did were legitimate.
3. Explain? How is a mall restricting you? Stores will kick you out for being loud and obstructive. It happens all the time without legal repercussion. Actually the government does protect the rights of Facebook, Google, etc to host content by users that are calls to violence, harm, abuse, etc. there are many examples of this. The constitution will never tell a company it has to do business with an entity that hosts that content though. That’s what’s crazy about the duality of free market ideologues. They want business to have free reign but then hate when they exercise it? I’m having a hard time trying to grasp what you’re getting at here, actually.
My point about censorship is in juxtaposition to government censorship which is what society should be worried about. If a business doesn’t want to do business with people who break the law that’s entirely up to them.
That is California law because of the Pruneyard decision. Read it if you want an explanation.
Edit: that last part should read: the right to make calls to violence in addition to the rights of private entities to choose to not do business with people for non-discriminatory reasons (discrimination based on protected statuses of individuals)
Parler could have rented a building, bought servers, racked and stacked those servers, networked them and gotten connectivity to the world. They didn't, they leased servers as a service from others, and then got burned when those services decided they were uncomfortable with the vitriolic anonymous speech being hosted on their hardware.
Had they truly built their own platform, no one could have taken from them. (It'd be lots harder anyhow)
And I don't think it's that hard to get office space with a real contract?
There is a discussion to be had about what services should be available under common carrier or common carrier like terms, and what should not.
I'd argue that at least in the internet sphere, at least DNS, Access (either ISP or peering), and probably payments of some measure should be. I don't think PAAS systems ought to be, you can do without them, nor do I think hosted services (email, simple hosting, whatever) should be either.
We have an issue online where unfettered anonymous free speech is largely untenable in the current regulatory environment, I think that should be changed.
I also hold the view that unfettered anonymous free speech is broadly unworkable because it removes the feedback loop between speech and response to it - but that's a separate issue for society to work out, and shouldn't really be up to big corporations to fix (often poorly) on their own.
In another vein, Scott Alexander needed (partial) anonymity not to speak truth to power but to keep his patients from finding him, finding a disagreement, and treating him as an enemy. Even if it were just him in that situation, you'd be robbing me of books worth of philosophy, politics, and science- stuff that has made me a better person and a better thinker.
And you'd be removing me from this conversation, because I have friends and family across the political spectrum who I would prefer not to offend, and I have heterodox views that would upset the right with leftness and the left with rightness. Perhaps you think I should be prevented from speaking openly, but you certainly can't say it's because I am avoiding feedback- I'm seeking feedback for positions I would otherwise quietly go on believing.
What is the value added that would justify taking away the rights of so many powerless? Of suppressing any ideas that are not already mainstream?
I'm also fairly heterodox in my views (and queer on top of that) but when you have a random dude on a couch who can reach an audience of millions at the press of a button, the math changes - algorithmic amplification of hate, wingnuttery, etc - is a serious problem for the stability of democracy.
The issue isnt anonymous speech persay, that always has existed and should - it just used to cost something before, you had to have money for a printer, convince the printer to print your screed, distribute it widely enough to have an impact. Those costs lessened the impact, and reduced the societal risks.
Elsewhere on here, I proposed a federated karma system that extends the idea of community reputation (a norm in closed communities, like HN, Furry, etc) as a transparent replacement for direct editorial control, while still persisting anonymity.
1. Early 2000s created a bunch of social media websites with free speech (then meaning protection from Christian-right censorship, which was the concern at the time) as a premise. These were fine places. There were occasional nutjobs and constant arguments, but people were generally comfortable participating. I argued with racists one day, communists the next, fascists, nazis. I developed a deeper understanding of my own beliefs on those issues. I argued against but was eventually convinced by drug legalization, trans rights, abortion rights- the list is long and embarrassing.
2. These websites saw an opportunity for growth, accelerated maybe by Facebook's IPO, but starting somewhere around the late 00s. The nutjobs and arguments were a turn-off to a potentially larger user base. So they drew a line in the sand, clefting the population into the would-be-censored and the would-not-be. The would-bes had to go express themselves somewhere else. If I wanted to argue with fringe people, I had to go into their echo chamber. It was not the place for me.
3. Opinions that were common on both sides in the 90s became opinions of the right only, and then became forbidden. The line in the sand moved leftwards. Little effort was made to convince anyone that these changes were good (I agree they were); mockery and 'educate yourself, bigot' became the norm. Extremism grew rapidly in both the de jure right-leaning spaces and the de facto left-leaning spaces, because the two groups had entered into feedback loops. Remaining holdouts were forced to move because expressing correlated viewpoints was now faux pas, and they faced guilt by association.
4. Sometime around 2015, people collectively decided that everything needed to be political all the time. This was a moral imperative. My apolitical communities were overrun by propagandists of one side or another (mostly the left, but I was on Reddit so that biases things). As Trump's campaign wore on, people concluded that the issue was not enough censorship, and added more.
5. The situation worsened, and COVID made 'misinformation' the new pro-censorship buzzword. More censorship was clearly the answer. Lab-leak theorists were suppressed and the Hunter Biden story was censored weeks before the election. Any remaining general public trust in the institutions responsible and their allies faded further. Election doubts festered the same way everything else had and we wound up with Jan 6.
6. More censorship?
7. Profit
That's just my personal experience, and I recognize that others see things differently. On top of that, fascism gained power a number of times through the 1900s, which was pre-internet, and often did so in censorious environments like Weimar Germany. Things like climate change denial and anti-vax both predate mainstream social media. All-in-all, blaming the lack of internet censorship for our polarization and extremism today falls very flat for me.
Setting all of that aside, it does not make sense to me that we should restrict human rights because some corporate algorithm amplifies hateful or extreme speech. Rewrite the damn algorithm.
I do like your federated karma system, and I have also thought about things like opt-in moderation (to enable opposing voices to occupy the same space comfortably) or a small limit on comments per user per day (to prevent things like 1% of twitter users write 80% of tweets, and encourage higher effort contributions). I don't think these solutions violate free speech, and they may produce better outcomes than 'don't censor'. But 'don't censor' would be a great start.
> 1. Early 2000s created a bunch of social media websites with free speech (then meaning protection from Christian-right censorship, which was the concern at the time) as a premise. These were fine places. There were occasional nutjobs and constant arguments, but people were generally comfortable participating. I argued with racists one day, communists the next, fascists, nazis. I developed a deeper understanding of my own beliefs on those issues. I argued against but was eventually convinced by drug legalization, trans rights, abortion rights- the list is long and embarrassing.
I started out towards the center, and remain towards the center, but because I'm not particularly lefty or conservative, I tend to hold a whole lot of heterodox opinions which makes the left consider me a conservative, and the right a lefty. I've had some look in convincing people to change their views though because of those heterodox views. I even wrote a substack about it.
> 2. These websites saw an opportunity for growth, accelerated maybe by Facebook's IPO, but starting somewhere around the late 00s. The nutjobs and arguments were a turn-off to a potentially larger user base. So they drew a line in the sand, clefting the population into the would-be-censored and the would-not-be. The would-bes had to go express themselves somewhere else. If I wanted to argue with fringe people, I had to go into their echo chamber. It was not the place for me.
See, I dont see it that way, it was the rise of algorithmic promotion of posts, and the need to monetize with advertising that caused the issue - they got embarrassed by racists or crazy ass shit going viral. The issue for me wasn't the censorship, it was that they algorithmically game the system to lift engagement every higher.
> 3. Opinions that were common on both sides in the 90s became opinions of the right only, and then became forbidden. The line in the sand moved leftwards. Little effort was made to convince anyone that these changes were good (I agree they were); mockery and 'educate yourself, bigot' became the norm. Extremism grew rapidly in both the de jure right-leaning spaces and the de facto left-leaning spaces, because the two groups had entered into feedback loops. Remaining holdouts were forced to move because expressing correlated viewpoints was now faux pas, and they faced guilt by association.
Right leaning spaces moved significantly further right as an anti-establishment backlash was unleashed. The lefties did move left, but not anywhere near as far left as the right have moved right. (and I had conservatives telling in in 2012 that dems had moved far far left over the last 8 years - and I couldn't see it, I did eventually start to see it around 2018, when I detected a drift left.)
> 4. Sometime around 2015, people collectively decided that everything needed to be political all the time. This was a moral imperative. My apolitical communities were overrun by propagandists of one side or another (mostly the left, but I was on Reddit so that biases things). As Trump's campaign wore on, people concluded that the issue was not enough censorship, and added more.
There was this point in 2012-2013 when I realized that everyone was angry all the time about basically everything all the time.
I didnt see the censorship start to crop up until 2018, 2019, most of it was silencing things that.. even by my free speech oriented perspective, was intended to incite violence. I will argue firmly as a centrist that the right's rhetoric by this point was firmly violent.
> 5. The situation worsened, and COVID made 'misinformation' the new pro-censorship buzzword. More censorship was clearly the answer. Lab-leak theorists were suppressed and the Hunter Biden story was cen...
It's like You know. I have not suffered enough according to those sanctions. Lost a flat of my mother in my homeland. And now loss Amazon/IMBD accounts. Seems that I will be loosing my Google account soon.
Better to get it cheaper and less counterfeit/crappy the first time. Since delivery time from Amazon for non-Prime people has slowed to a crawl, it's a good motivator to discover best-in-class ecommerce sites rather than the mediocre-at-everything-but-sometimes-the-mediocre-thing-arrives-the-same-day-you-order-it site.
Sites that aren't paying the price of Amazon marketing, or charging an Amazon premium, so usually the prices are better. You might find that you usually use Amazon 95% of the time for just a few classes of product, and you're better served buying those from three other sites and leaving the last 5% of spontaneous purchases for which you don't have a good source with Amazon.
> AWS started political censorship
It is easy to see how this could happen. AWS Sanctions compliance team: ok, the government says we need to shut down Russian accounts, so we will lock any account using a Russian payment method. False positives can just call tech support to prove that they are not bots and have the offending payment method replaced.
Meanwhile over in support: Boss: remember it is corporate policy that a CSR may not make any changes to billing information for a customer’s account after the stolen cards incident.
Russian accounts are not banned. If anyone interested.
Spam, bots, fake stories, constant outrage. It's miserable but people seem to become addicted.
If you start a new account that behaves like spam, there's a good chance that you'll get treated like spam -- and that's probably an acceptable tradeoff because the alternative is no working platform at all.
If Twitter suspends my account, I wouldn't expect much considering it's a free service with tens of millions more users than Stripe. They're definitely going to get more things wrong.
Do we have any examples to draw from operating at that scale? Due to the Musk purchase, we have a rare public disclosure of a major tech giant's internal workings where Twitter claims (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/07/twitter-s...) it suspends half a million spam accounts a day. It's trivial to file an appeal, so (because the attackers are by no means disincentivized from appealing) that's probably on the order of 250,000 appeals a day if we assume even half the banned won't bother (and I think that assumption is low, since a reasonable system should probably make it trivial to file an appeal, therefore people will). How does one reasonably handle that? To scale up to thousands of humans handling it, you'd need strict rules to even approximate getting the same result across everyone, and if strict rules worked you could code them into the auto-ban system.
One solution might actually be "Stop having 'get every human being on the service' as a goal," but then sucks for the people who can't use the thing.
"We charge $100 to have a human look at this case, if the suspension was incorrect we reinstate the account and your money. If not, we tell you what actions you can take that would un-violate our policies so you could be re-instated."
Spammers doing selenium powered spam would never pay for that, but the real folks who are not tight with large audiences would have an option.
I can't imagine Twitter could get away with this without it being interpreted by the regulatory bodies of various countries as a protection racket. Which is unfortunate, because I think there's potential here.
Well yeah, it's trivial to file an appeal if you just have to click a button, but obviously that's not what I was talking about. Have they tried literally anything else?
Solve difficult CAPTCHAs, send a scan of your passport, pay a small amount of money (e.g. $1), put a large amount of money in escrow like someone else suggested, allow other well-known accounts to vouch for you, etc. etc. etc.
There's a ton of things you could do. It seems like they've given up without trying any of them.
By Ben's own description of how the @StratecheryINT account was operated [0] -- i.e. "a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world." -- this is exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit that we'd want Twitter spam-detectors to cull with minimal time and resources.
Not only b/c of the obvious spam characteristics, but because it was a days-old account with few (if any) followers/followings. Even if it were a mistake, very little of value has been lost, since every tweet was the result of an automated script (i.e. simple to make a new account, and recreate the content that had thus far zero engagement).
Do people seriously think every such case -- an empty days-old account suddenly doing spam-like activity -- should be manually reviewed? That's a daily waste of human resources for tens of thousands (edit: actually it's millions [1]) of trivial permaban decisions -- exactly the kind of thing that an autoban algorithm can efficiently handle.
> For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.
I have the same sentiment, but with a different angle. Verified accounts like Thompson's get a lot of leeway with bending/breaking the rules before facing actual punishment. If a lesser known user deployed a selenium-twitter-spam-bot on AWS, it's possible both their spam bot and their real account would be permanently suspended
[0] https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229
[1] https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237583058952192?ref_sr...
You can reach out to support, but I don't know that support actually ever responds to any requests. Apparently according to posts on reddit if you add your number to twitter and something happens you won't even be able to ever remove it. Similarly they have weird intransparent policies regarding what numbers are allowed on twitter.
At the end of the day, most tech giants are unreachable. I hate to be that guy,but in a way it's kind of like the big chinese tech dystopia that all HN so adamantly complain about.
He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam.
That's an instant contradiction, of course, because spam is perfectly legal under the US constitution.
And every attempt to eliminate spam and bots, whether human or automated, will necessarily sweep up many non-spam and non-bot accounts as false positives.
He's used to making these sorts of promises.
It would eliminate multiple accounts per user, make all users known for wrongspeak prosecution, and largely cure the spam issue unless you're a well funded organization that can pay poor people to risk getting a lifetime ban to promote your spam.
Similarly if you enforce it for everyone to pay for themselves, there would immediately be large parts of the world population that wouldn't be able to pay for it. Note that afford and be able to pay isn't the same thing. Which would turn it into the same western echo chamber they basically want it to be.
Or permanently. I once responded to an inane Kardashian tweet with a very dry restatement that she got famous for a boring porn tape and a father who got OJ Simpson off of a murder rap.
I was told that was "a threat" and perma-banned. 12 years of an account, spun into the void. I'd be angry but it's more embarrassing as an observation.
Twitter supports a usenet-on-acid model of bumrushing fan-bases on one side, and a long tail of bots and noise. It's truly strange how its become what it has.
Can you imagine Google answering a phone call or a chat line to explain how to arrange bookmarks in Chrome? Ok, Chrome doesn't cost money, so maybe that's fair. How about Microsoft helping to move the taskbar back to the bottom of the screen? How about Samsung explaining how to set DoNotDisturb? Facebook walking you through how to recover from somebody taking over your account?
Ah, the bad old good old days...
Removing it from the search results and unlinking its @handle in tweets from other accounts would have been enough, if it was spam, to prevent it from being shown at all to anyone.
If it’s useful for non-spam people who want to follow it from an offsite link, it’ll gain valid followers that can hint towards undoing its shadow ban over a long period of time — and by not doing follow activity of any sort in return, it’s clearly not playing the follow spam game in order to try and mask itself as anything other than a one-way feed account, so there’s no harm in letting active users follow it.
It just reads like Twitter isn’t able to distinguish how it treats RSS feeds from how it treats spambots, due solely to a limited stable of technical reactions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33276718
The problem is not that the account triggered an algorithmic tripwire, but that the explanatory copy is a customer-hostile lie. It states in no uncertain terms that the suspension was further "carefully reviewed" to be found correct, and is also permanent. Obviously, it wasn't correct, and wasn't permanent.
I strongly suspect that, if there even was a human in the loop as the copy implies, they simply rubber-stamped the algorithmic flag. This is not necessarily the human's fault if their work is monitored/timed.
"Permanently suspended" seems both accurate and helpful -- it doesn't mean that the account can't leave that state, but that unlike most other suspensions, the account will not be unsuspended after a set period of time. The note that Ben posted explicitly says "you can submit an appeal", which would imply to most people the possibility of reversion.
Which rules did he break?
I guess they handle appeals differently depending on the alleged infraction.
"Permanently" only means there is no time limit with an automatic reactivation afterwards.
It's absolutely possible for a "normie" to get a permanent ban reviewed and lifted.
"Permanently suspended" (with chance to appeal the suspension in the message) means exactly what happened here.
Just "suspended" is not a good option at all, because it says nothing about duration.
That's every company policy, ultimately. C-Suites and the like exist partially to do "exception handling" (or for all y'all Papists out there, "special dispensations")
The account was suspended for 10 days and I'm still trying to get the app (separately suspended) that runs it unsuspended...
They must be going through some kind of crazy time over there between nation-state trolls, the Musk fiasco and the run-up to midterm elections. Yeesh.
[0] https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/twitter-ban
It is this kind of behavior that make me lose my trust with Twitter (or YouTube or FB, and etc).
> It’s the “after careful review” line that has me riled up tbh. I can understand why an automated system suspended it. Don’t lie to me!
-- https://nitter.kavin.rocks/benthompson/status/15830633139484...
It's a new account that posted 75 tweets in less than 20 minutes, all linking to the same website, and with high-profile names in the title of the tweets.
This looks like spam to me, I would have banned it too.
A human would have. He's just pointing out something to redirect the ire.
Specifically, that it says "careful", and yet a robot did the work, and presumably robots can't be full of care.
Why? Is a list of episodes inherently spam? What definition are you using?
I certainly wouldn't have banned this account
Careful review doesn't mean that a human reviewed it, just that a group of them were highly paid to implement the system of rules that banned him.
Suspended: Caused to stop for a while; interrupted or delayed.
You are permanently stopped for a while.
Unfortunately: Happening through bad luck
Through bad luck (not an intentional decision we are making), our policy prohibits that.
Unfortunately, your account has been permanently suspended.
> has been
"we didn't do it, it just sort of happened"
“Banned” is a negative word so we don’t want to use that. But we still want to ban you, thus “permanently suspended.”
It’s not a new trend as “made redundant” (ie, fired) and “focusing on value” (ie, cancelled your project) are all over press releases and public communication.
I think it makes me feel worse than just using plain language as it takes me more effort to figure out the meaning so I’m also frustrated by the fakery in addition to whatever the negative message is. Makes the speaker and organization seem stupid.
What I'm saying is "permanently suspended" isn't sugar coating what happened
This is entirely subjective, but to me saying "Banned" is terse, rough, and firm. It spits out like a slap.
Being "suspended" is temporary. It sounds more gentle, less gruff. (Almost) all kids have been "suspended" from a sport or activity because of something that they did, but they were allowed to play again after a short period. The catch is the qualifier being "Permanently" changes it to being a Ban, but it doesn't sound that way at first.
Language is silly. You can say the same thing in very different ways that come across more or less negative, and I think that's the same as what's happening in the corporate veiled speech.
Just a question.
What's the true harm in letting even obvious spammers spam as much as they want on their social media profiles? Let them waste their time. Social media is a bit different than a message board where everybody is burdened by any spam that's posted because you have to follow somebody intentionally to see their idiocy on social media. If somebody wants to post 100 ads for viagra a day on some dumb Twitter bot profile, who is actually going to follow them other than maybe other bots? You really only have to worry about cleaning up the search results to ensure that the spam is hidden from standard searches.
The only person who should be upset about random bot spam on social media is the advertiser that might have paid a lot of money for loads of low-quality ad impressions. Well, doesn't it follow that the advertising payment system and business model is the real issue here, not automating spam detection? Somewhere in the process, social media has to ensure that advertisers aren't paying for bot impressions. It's not necessarily the spam itself that's the real issue.
I agree, profile spam only seems harmful to the search results.
Reply spam, on the other hand, is a big problem. But there was no reply spam in Ben's suspended account.
If that's not your business model, abuse prevention is trivial. You can operate the network like a members' club where people gain privileges (such as posting links, media, etc - anything that can be used to spam or harm other users/the platform) over time as they prove themselves and acquire trust (Stack Overflow calls this number "reputation") and you can then use this trust number as a weight in automated decisions, so that high-trust users (who are unlikely to suddenly burn their hard-earned account) will not be impacted by an automated ban.
Forums in the good old days were ran by volunteers were able to deal with spam/abuse just fine with a combination of bans and privilege levels (it will take time & effort to level up an account to where it's able to post links/etc and be useful for spamming), there's absolutely no reason current social media companies can't do the same, if it wasn't for the fact that their business model to a certain extent relies on moderation being both unfair to users and subpar at effectively suppressing bad content (hint: bad content is nice to have around as long as it's not too visible, as it generates tons of outrage and thus engagement - it's only a problem when powerful people get wind of it and then you delete it and issue a fake apology).
There are ~21M questions on StackOverflow, which is equivalent to the number of tweets posted every a single hour and the number of items shared on Facebook every 8 minutes.
To me it sounds reasonable to ban an alleged spam account for a limited period e.g. 24h - spammers won't bother waiting and will just create another account just like they normally do. An abandoned account can then be deleted.
Can anyone point out any obvious flaws in my reasoning?
Because that’s simpler?
> spammers won't bother waiting and will just create another account just like they normally do
What makes you think they will not bother waiting 24h? If I were managing a spambots farm I guess I would rather wait 24h than go through the hassle of re-creating a Twitter account.
Using decentralized tools might improve the situation.
Also, as others have pointed out, "suspension" implies that the interruption is temporary, so "permanently suspended" doesn't even make sense.
Although, it seems that the reality of the situation is closer to "your account is permanently banned unless you manage to raise enough fuss that an actual human looks at it."
Without centralization it's just some kind of trust network, and since the messages are open it's a much easier problem to filter away unwanted material than to deal with things like e-mail spam.
The reason people don't is simply that they want power over political discourse, so they accept what part of these problems are problems for them and are then happy for the other problems.
Also, who was banned from twitter because of their politics?
This is not true with decentralized services. If, for example, I have a Mastodon account and you want to follow me, we don't have to use the same service provider. You don't even have to use Mastodon software. You could use something else that speaks ActivityPub like Pixelfed or Friendica.
You would be enlisted (by force) to be the first astronauts to visit the sun.
"Misleading Info Reporting Flow - Some of you can report Tweets for containing misinformation. This is currently available in limited testing to some people in Australia, Brazil, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain, and the US, though we are exploring how to expand. These reports are reviewed and acted on independently from other Tweet reporting flows (e.g. for abuse), as this test flow is used to inform our misinformation-related strategy and operations. "
https://help.twitter.com/en/resources/addressing-misleading-...
OT but just yesterday I finally decided to join Discord fad for some open-source communities, but my freshly created account got instantly disabled after successful validation with email and phone, that without sending any message. Unfortunately I don't own a second phone number to register another one.
I better stick with my veteran ways - IRC, mail-lists, forums. Matrix is on my list to check.
I think that's what PayPal is trying to teach me, where logins will randomly fail with an adblocker and 2fa enabled.
They really don’t like Firefox though. Had a coworker get bitten by this recently.
Mozilla should sue them. Or start suggesting matrix.org when the user tries to visit Discord.
> It’s the “after careful review” line that has me riled up tbh. I can understand why an automated system suspended it. Don’t lie to me!
-- https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583063313948499969
And yeah, I have to agree. I absolutely hate it when providers (shipping companies are great at this) tell me obvious lies. Hey, I can handle issues and problems. What I can’t handle are lies.
According to one EA Forum Moderator, there are actual people reviewing appeals, but the fact that they upheld my ban saying it was correct only to revert it 2 weeks after I stopped fighting them tells me their process is flawed.
My best guess is bans are handed out automatically based on whatever heuristic, but the human review merely checks the log generated by the automated system for rudimentary errors. Was my account the one flagged and not a different user by mistake? Yes. Ban upheld. (except not, when they gave my account back with no apology)
I think he's angry that didn't actually carefully review anything.
Which probably means "careful" is one of those words that sounds positive but is legally meaningless, so corporations will abuse it shamelessly for propaganda purposes.
I'm talking like seconds of review, e.g. the report says "In 5 minute span, account tweeted from a known U.S. AWS server and a Europe AWS server, etc. etc. Confirm suspension", and the human clicks "Confirm" and moves on to the next hundred reports to "review"
We can't, but that's part of the propaganda game.
> ...maybe there's a process in which a report listing the suspicious signals is glanced at by a human auditor.
> I'm talking like seconds of review, e.g. the report says "In 5 minute span, account tweeted from a known U.S. AWS server and a Europe AWS server, etc. etc. Confirm suspension", and the human clicks "Confirm" and moves on to the next hundred reports to "review"
That's actually a good example of not being careful.
Not just that a human checked it, but a human carefully checked it. Humans are so often quick and/or sloppy that the word careful was needed even before the invention of computers.
It's spam, so the account got suspended for posting spam. The fact that it was posted by Ben Thompson doesn't change the fact that it's spam. We can complain about automated moderation processes that make obvious mistakes all day, because it keeps happening, but this case doesn't look like an example of it.
The account did not violate Twitter rules in any way. It wasn't sending replies. It wasn't retweeting other accounts. It wasn't liking other accounts. It wasn't interacting with other accounts in any way. Should there be no accounts on Twitter that have a list of episodes of a program?
People follow these accounts because they want to be notified of new episodes. It's not spam, it's a service.
I tweet links to my blog posts on my Twitter account. Should I be suspended? What's wrong with external links?
Have you posted with this level of frequency, from different IPs? You may not need to worry if you have not.
I don't know, maybe? I tend to tweet along with Apple keynotes, for example.
My IP changes whenever I switch from wifi to cellular.
> For the record, this is a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world.
It seems obvious that the tweets were automated -- during some periods, it tweeted every ~10 seconds. If it were switching IPs at that same rate, especially if the IPs were in known AWS/Azure/etc ranges, then it's obviously not going to be authentic human activity.
In your personal situation, even if you had IP changes between every tweet -- I assume your account has some tenure, and is more than just a few days old? Twitter keeps track of all the IPs you've ever logged in from, and for older known accounts, there's probably more tolerance for weird activity (e.g. bouncing between VPNs) than a days-old account that has done nothing but suspicious spam.
Well, my Twitter account has been suspended at least 4 times for dumb reasons or no apparent reason at all.
> nothing but suspicious spam
It was not spam. Tweeting is not spam. Tweeting a lot is not even spam. Unsolicited replies, for example, can be spam. Ben's account did not interact with anyone. There was no unsolicited interaction whatsoever.
Also, there was no violation of Twitter rules.
But the point is moot for now since Ben (AFAIK) hasn't posted any more details about the suspension note. IIRC, the suspension email is supposed to list the alleged violations, and I don't think Ben has tweeted a screenshot of that email. [1]
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-autom...
[1] https://twitter.com/hollandcourtney/status/11255719071877242...
If Gruber's accounts are not spam, then Thompson's account is not spam either. The age of the account and other statistics are irrelevant, because the same rules ought to apply to everyone.
I think it ought to be uncontroversial that an account shouldn't be suspended if it hasn't violated the rules, but somehow many people in this thread are defending the punishment of the innocent.
There's actually no rule against bots on Twitter. In fact there are some accounts now explicitly labeled "Automated". The goal ought to be not "detecting bots" but rather "detecting rule violations".
I'm just talking about what I think looks clearly like spam, and what I think reasonable spam policies would look like. That whole Twitter thread of accusations has now been deleted, so I'm not necessarily addressing the exact text of it. I'm just saying that one of those posting patterns looks very clearly like spam and the other very clearly does not appear to be spam.
I disagree. Tweeting links without interacting in any way with other accounts is to me clearly not spam.
There were no automated tweets. https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583163548708241410 "Account was not scripted. Everything was posted by a human"
> if there was a new account created just to have a bot spam out links at a high rate, how would it look different than this account?
I think we differ on the definition of "spam".
Tweeting links on your own profile is not spam. Tweeting links in replies to other users can be spam. Ben's account was not replying at all, just tweeting in its own profile. A Twitter user would generally only see those tweets if they followed Ben's account. The was no unsolicited pushing.
"Permanent" is harsh. Maybe a couple hours of cooldown and a "did you mean to start a thread or post these hourly?" message would be a nice alternative.
(And the domain was available)
Or was that a later change?
From his own words, this "Stratechery Interviews" account was a new account that only sent out tweets of links from multiple locations around the world. In other words, the only thing really distinguishing it from spam on a technical level is that Ben liked the content it was tweeting about.
Sure, I'd be annoyed too, but Ben's rage tweets just show to me that even the most rational among us become emotional when we don't get something want.
The account was not harming or annoying anyone. Does it even qualify as "spam"?
It is shocking though how much much more blatant spam goes unchecked. Pretty much every tweet by popular accounts has a slew of crypto spam replies.
I guess the issue is that these conditions alone are now enough to warrant a ban 'on a technical level', when a few years accounts like that existed with no issue. Spam's a huge issue on Twitter, no doubt, but it seems like things are getting worse and it's fair to ask for some accountability.
Is that useful account hard to disambiguate from a spam account? Yes, but that’s Twitter’s job here.
Look at email. People get tons of notification-only email that are little more than links. Email providers simply have to figure out how to block spam without blocking legitimate email, and they largely have. Social has the same obligation.
RSS, we miss you
Some RSS readers support following Twitter accounts, but they use the third party app API. I personally follow Twitter accounts in NewsBlur.
Tweeting out links. So? One of the most basic use cases there are, for example a brand tweeting links to press releases.
From multiple locations. So? You mean like every multinational?
None of these factors have any smoking gun indicator to decisively and permanently suspend an account. On the other end of the spectrum we have a zillion crypto bots having the exact same avatar, name variations, auto-tweeting within the second of a main tweet being posted, and this is not spam.
Even if you find such entity "spamming" links, it still doesn't meet the more traditional definition of spam. Said account does not notify anybody, does not comment, direct message, it's just self-spamming.
Ben Thomson should hire somebody to run his social media. Admin work of any kind will comes with hassles. A tech thought leader writing so childishly over a hiccup makes me question the value of his insights. But then I was never really sold on his writing to begin with, as it's a little too Economist-y. Nicely written, 30k ft view stuff for the managerial classes.
Other than cyber-utopian hype, social media sales pitches, and the human love for "a deal too good to be true...while it lasts", is there any reason to expect competent, reliable customer service from any large social media company which is based on free accounts? Let alone a company which shows ~no evidence of being able to break even (financially, over time)?
I just stopped using FB.
I will go on to say that this remains a generally unsolved problem for companies working at scale that are under scrutiny and dealing with financial or social fraud. They are willing to accept false negatives instead of false positives.
I worked in an organization that prided itself with great customer service, and they did deliver. The cost of doing so (resolving each case manually, often giving benefit to the customer) is significant.
Amazon is another prime example of a company that does customer service well - though that might have some consequences on their work culture (mistakes are not easily forgiven - since the cost is so high). Not an apples to apples comparison though, Twitter is ad based (much higher volume/users needed for revenue) unlike Amazon.
More users = more challenges with the same level of staff. That’s how you end up with a cheap processes (lots of automation, outsourced reviews) designed to handle 90% cases vs. an expensive/more thorough process (manual checks by experts along the way) that can handle 99% cases.
Certainly not. In fact they have one of the most incompetent customer services. When I changed my bank account, they didn't change my bank account, but rather created a new user with the new bank data. Then when I asked them to remove the old wrong account, they were very nice confirming that they will do that. But instead they deleted my new account, with only the old account remaining. When complaining about that they ignored it, so I just deleted my old account also, and am a happy non-Amazon customer since.
When people on hacker news are literally shadow banned, have their comments hidden with zero feedback or notice.
In fact i guarantee this comment cant be seen either.
On HN, shadowbanning (i.e. banning accounts without telling them) is nearly always for accounts that don't have much posting history—either spam accounts or ones that show signs of having abused HN in the past, such as serial trolls. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32040389 has links back to a bunch of longer explanations, if anyone wants more.
p.s. After a quick look, I'd say HN's system is working reasonably well in your case because most of your good comments are getting vouched for by users, which unkills them, and most of your bad (for HN) comments are rightfully staying killed. There are cases of banned accounts that shouldn't stay banned, but this isn't one of them.
To spice things up, all these services also stopped providing any kind of support regarding these kind of problems. Ever tried to get into contact with anybody about a banned account?
Just some weeks ago Discord decided to ban my 6 year old account out of nowhere. I didn't used Discord for 4 weeks, since I was on vacation. Also I am pretty sure, that it wasn't hacked, because I used MFA and no other account was affected.
I tried to contact the support, but only got a template response, that they don't talk about reasons and my account data will also be deleted in 14 days. I tried to contact them again, but they simply blocked my mail after that.
I didn't do any suspicious on discord ever. So I really had no clue why this happened. While talking with friends and coworker I've heard similar stories. And everybody of us changed their hardware multiple times beforehand (for example to test a specific component or for overclocking). Gotta love automatic banning systems...
I don't know what the solution is. I don't use social media (except HN, I don't know if it falls under social media category) and I don't feel the need to. It is super easy to not use Facebook, Twitter etc. But I have to use banks, insurance etc - there is no way to vote with wallet there, as almost every bank is as bad as the next one. I know of at least one college who post their class schedule, events etc only on Facebook, forcing their students to have a FB account. The level of stupidity...
I don't ever want to be trapped in a Kafka-esque trial by corporate automation!