"Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending."
Well, first of all, “tweets” don’t “trend”. Terms do. So this description feels off, already.
Next, I wonder, but don’t care enough to look it up, if this guy is adequately summarized by only mentioning his concern for children?
Screw that, I did look him up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya#COVID-19_pa.... He was one of the people behind the “Great” Barrington Declaration and, kn the early months of the pandemic, argued, among other things, that COVID is rather harmless. He also took money from the airline industry without disclosing as much in his publications.
It’s arguable if Bhattacharya’s reach needed to be limited. What’s really hard to argue is that the thing about children is an adequate characterization of his statements during the pandemic. This is prime evidence that this story is not presenting anything close to a fair interpretation of the documents they have been given, and that you have, unfortunately, fallen for it.
He's a Dr. and a Stanford professor of medicine. The Great Barrington Declaration was signed by almost a million doctors. They were warning about the harm lockdowns would do to kids and they were correct.
Even if they weren't, this would still be unacceptable.
As I said, it’s debatable if the guy’s reach needed to be limited, the point you are arguing.
What’s not debatable is that the breathless outrage-bait under discussion misrepresented the case for limiting the Dr’s reach with a straw-man argument, and so did you.
>“It’s shaping up to be one of the highest-impact things that we’ve done,” the chief executive, Jack Dorsey ,said of the update, which will change how tweets appear in search results or conversations. “The spirit of the thing is that we want to take the burden off the person receiving abuse or mob-like behavior.”
> The new system will use behavioral signals to assess whether a Twitter account is adding to – or detracting from – the tenor of conversations...
> The updated algorithm will result in certain tweets being pushed further down in a list of search results or replies, but will not delete them from the platform.
... and I've worked on Reveddit for four years. Less than 1% of Redditors know that all removed comments are secretly removed.
It's hard to make people care about this stuff. Most of us only start to see the harm of something when it's shown in context. Just showing that something can be theoretically harmful isn't enough.
TYVYS shadowbanning and silently removing comment is such cowardly behavior. Against spam bots, fine. But against what are obviously real people? It's wrong.
Transparently removing content is the normal way to moderate a forum. This research [1] suggests it reduces mod workload because users learn the rules. Discourse doesn't secretly remove content and is popular.
It isn't accurate to say secrecy increases site quality. No such qualitative study has been done.
That's talking about article submissions, not comments. Couldn't read the PDF because the link is broken.
More than 95% of the time I see a flagged account on HN, they post complete garbage that leads to more flaming replies if not removed promptly. HN has a very limited set of moderators, like one or two, who cannot police every comment 24/7.
>Discourse doesn't secretly remove content and is popular.
Popular where? In corporate and niche business use cases? What are some public Discourses that allow everyone to post?
> That's talking about article submissions, not comments
Shadow moderation was implemented without doing any research. I agree it's about time more studies are done on all types of content and all platforms in order to assess whether or not this functionality furthers the platforms' goals.
> Couldn't read the PDF because the link is broken
Good call. Blog post summarizing [1] and pdf [2]
> Popular where? In corporate and niche business use cases? What are some public Discourses that allow everyone to post?
All of them that don't use the ShadowBan add-on, I guess.
Indeed shadow moderation appears to have made platforms more popular. I won't disagree there. But I also think it's clear it has contributed to echo chambers and increased isolation and tribality.
I think we're reaching a point where the public wants to know what's going on in social media. Its harmful nature is not just driven by preference-driven news feeds, which we already know can be toxic, it's also driven by shadow moderation. That's the other shoe that may be dropping here.
You could have just use the menu to find it, it only took a few seconds. There's a preprint available there if you need it.
https://shagunjhaver.com/research/
No. I don't assume I have any rights other than vis-a-vis the government. I've dealt with a lot of corporate bullshit from tech companies, it's an annoyance but I just handle it and don't make a career out of whining about it as some do.
I've been arrested and kept in jail overnight on false charges for being a political activist, people complaining about being in Twitter or facebook jail don't impress me much (especially when almost all of them have a backup account).
Presumably you eat at restaurants whose food you like and buy hardware whose quality you like. It's the same with social media. You can give attention to systems you support and share information about them. The alternative you propose sounds like cowering to company overlords.
And where are you that it is illegal to be a political activist?
Not when the platform (a) benefits from network effects that make it immune from private sector free market competition (b) actively colludes with government officials
Twitter being one of the largest communication platforms in the world is something that I am much more concerned about than a much smaller internet forum.
If we can now expect the leading health experts in the world to be potentially speaking in hyperbole, then we can't expect the public to trust what they say to be accurate.
Surely, you can't be serious. The setting isn't a paper but a news interview, where they want the general idea of a study, not the details. In a news interview, saying "people who smoke get cancer" is perfectly acceptable (and not likely to "get people killed"), even though not 100% of them do.
"Still trying to process my emotions on learning that @twitter blacklisted me. The thought that will keep me up tonight: censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt."
So instead it's better to stunt children's development with lockdowns and give them early heart attacks with jabs? Regardless of yours or my position however, this debate shouldn't have been censored in the first place.
People had pointed out how stupid his proposal was when he made it, and he ignored them completely. At that point, he was just a crank (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/jlockdowns/). The debate was never censored: he was allowed to communicate with policy makers if he had any evidence to support his proposal. What was censored (or rather, not promoted to people who weren't his followers) was his wild rants to fellow Christian libertarians who believe the invisible hand of the free market is the gentle hand of the baby Jesus himself, which we should not shackle with regulations.
Slowing some children's development (while drastically accelerating others' because they were tutored by their parents who had to stay at home with them) is not even on the same scale as mass deaths and people dying outside hospitals due to lack of capacity.
I don’t know how other people think about this, but in my mind there is a large difference between censoring and not promoting, and the trends blacklist feels more like the latter.
IIRC the trending topics on Twitter are a mixture of automated and manually-selected. Not manually selecting him would be "not promoting", but putting him on a blacklist means he was prevented from naturally showing up - that's censoring.
Am I right in believing that the only supporting evidence (and this is very weak evidence) for this claim in the two parts so far is that Twitter employees donated more money to Democrats than Republicans? Has there been any other evidence that enforcement was biased? In this latest story, Weiss said the teams were handling hundreds of cases per day and then gave a total of four right-wing examples.
I love "The Twitter Files" name, it's hilarious and totally keeping in character with the conspiratorial nature of those involved (sounds like The X Files, very mysterious and suspicious!).
The episodic format of this - alongside being forced into exclusive twitter threads when it would be much more easily understood as a longer article or series of paragraphs - also comes across as a pretty blatant and desperate attempt by Musk to make twitter "the #1 source of news"
Spectacle is how Musk brands and motivates his companies. Tesla was originally climate change and lately has been self-driving. Space X is colonizing Mars. Twitter will be "radical transparency".
Even if Twitter does the exact same actions, Musk will frame them all as"radical transparency"
I wonder what Musk would say about the idea of limiting Tweets instead of banning them.
Oh, wait!
New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.
You're right it's not. I gather if you want to get two sides to talk who aren't talking, i.e. those who support that message vs. those who don't, you need to appeal to both.
I think there might be a reason two sides aren't talking.
Conservatives:
Rope, tree, journalist: some assembly required
Fuck Joe Biden
Fuck your feelings
These are all t-shirt slogans you can buy at conservative political events, and they're quite widespread rather than exceptional.
Also conservatives:
Why am I being shadow banned, this is viewpoint discrimination!
To be clear, there are obnoxious people and outright assholes all over the political spectrum. But conservatives have made outrage and offensiveness their brand, in recent years. I remember being astonished and disgusted by the gleeful antagonism of Rush Limbaugh back int eh 1990s when conservative talk radio first became A Thing following the Reagan administration's abolition of the 'Fairness doctrine.'
> I think there might be a reason two sides aren't talking.
Both sides can certainly find a reason not to speak to each other. The left claims the right is hateful, the right claims the left is obscene. It's always been like that, with one having the power to censor the other.
Here's an example [1]. One side, a well known entrepeneur/investor, is arguing for no censorship, and the other side, a well known disinformation researcher [2], argues for limits of the reach of certain content. One has blocked the other, so they no longer communicate directly.
Five years ago, someone at Twitter might have observed this interaction and decided, "I'm going to secretly action content. That will satisfy both the disinfo labeler and the anti-censorship crowd." Yet in doing so, as we can see, nobody is satisfied. They're still not talking to each other, and they don't understand why. The reason is due to the secrecy built into all of these platforms where an unknown third party is actioning content without anyone involved in the conversation knowing about it.
See also Free speech for me--but not for thee : how the American left and right relentlessly censor each other [3] (Nat Hentoff, 1992)
Interesting though these points are (and I'm familiar, as I am personally acquainted with DiResta), I think you are looking at this issue in too abstract a manner.
Ther's no obligation to have dialog with others who are actively threatening to kill you. Don't owe them a conversation or even a hearing.
I don't disagree with your characterization that 'the left claims the right is hateful, the right claims the left is obscene.' But there is a clear qualitative difference between the two sides in terms of the willingness to insinuate, actually issue, and finally carry out death threats, and it's not a wholly new phenomenon. I put it to you that the people who are amused by and choose to promote messages like 'rope, tree, journalist: some assembly required' do not actually give a shit about free speech but are opportunistically employing the grievance for political leverage.
Get back to me on this when the right stops openly calling to murder people on such a frequent basis and I'll be happy to consider it in more abstract terms. I see why you're concerned about this, but having extensive first hand experience of political violence I think shadow bans are a relatively minor issue by comparison.
> Ther's no obligation to have dialog with others who are actively threatening to kill you.
I never said there was. Even free speech law has limits and may punish such speech.
What I advocate is for authors of secretly removed content to be able to discover the removal, because even if the comment is vitriolic, the offending author may perceive the lack of a response as tacit approval of their words.
> But there is a clear qualitative difference between the two sides in terms of the willingness to insinuate, actually issue, and finally carry out death threats
Left wing extremists are currently saying that words are violence [1]. This is wrong, short of something that "in context, directly causes specific imminent serious harm", a definition from Nadine Strossen [2].
> Left wing extremists are currently saying that words are violence [1].
It’s the Republican, Trump-appointed, FBI director’s assessment that extremist right-wing political violence (read homegrown right-wing terrorism) is far and away a bigger problem than left-wing violence.
Jan 6 I hoped would have demonstrated that clearly once and for all. After that day, it has become impossible to “both sides” political violence in the US — it really is asymmetrically coming from the right.
It's not my intent to pick sides. I highlighted the left there only because parent focused on the right.
Regarding shadow moderation, I can promise you that every side of every issue in every geography and on every major platform uses it. See the talk linked in my profile for examples.
It's getting very boring hearing Americans going on about "Jan 6th". Some protesters entered a building. It's not that big a deal, no "political violence" happened.
It's been 20 years and Americans have finally recently stopped harping on about "9/11", after decades of them murdering orders of magnitudes more innocents. It's incredible to see them committing some of worst attrocities in the world and still loudly yell about their own tiny issues.
I'm aware of what you're advocating because you repeat it so often. I have no objection to your points about discoverability (indeed I mentioned else where that sufficiently obnoxious tweets could be highlighted as ban-worthy, rather than simply being removed - although this wouldn't mitigate the harm done by posting slurs etc.
It's a little odd to me that you contemplate hypotheticals like 'perceiving the lack of response as tacit approval.' It's not that this is incorrect, but that you're overlooking evidence of the alternative: when platforms like Twitter or FB leave posts up (to gather both argument and support) but attach some sort of note saying 'this post might be disinformation' or words to that effect.
That is what you are asking for, no? A clear signal that the social media post is disfavored by the platform operator in some way, such that the author is notified and given some context, and so is everyone else. I would appreciate if you would clarify whether or not this meets your desired standard of transparency.
The reason I bring this up is that when this approach is applied, authors of the controversial posts tend to hate it and still scream that they're being censored by being publicly shamed, or having words inserted into their social media post by the platform operator (notwithstanding the extremely obvious distinction.. Twitter has gone farther again by allowing users to add meta-commentary in the form of notes (previously birdwatch), but on controversial topics said notes are often railed against by the original author or the subject of meta-controversy by people trying to spam the note system with negative characterizations of the notes themselves.
If you're going to make transparency of moderation into your political cause (and you very much seem to approach it this way), then I think you should go all the way and address the questions of why people are not happy even when they get what you are advocating for, and just pivot to a slightly different variation of the same argument about how they're being censored and it's a terrible injustice etc.
Incidentally the definition in your 2nd link is not from Nadine Strossen; it's just a restatement of the prevailing legal standard for incitement (from Brandenburg v. Ohio) and indeed seems to be offered as such in the text. Like the 'true threat' doctrine, this definition is being interpreted in increasingly elastic fashion in our era of instantaneous mass communication.
I'm familiar with Strossen's book but also consider it to be written from a comfortable suite in an ivory tower. Like many well-intentioned idealists, she acknowledges the possibility of violence but argues that it must be met by reasoned debate and nonviolent resistance. I reject this posture, because it basically says people who are the target of violence should accept their role as punching bugs (or targets of gunfire) in exchange for the possibility of moving the conscience of elites who review circumstances, form policy, render decisions, and recognize peers (eg accepting or rejecting the validity of other states). In this mode of argument, willingness to passively sacrifice oneself is the threshold of acceptability - becoming famous for your advocacy and then dying for it like Christ, King, or Gandhi is the way to go. And conveniently, once people are dead they can be cited as moral exemplars without the troubling possibility of them reappearing and critiquing subsequent outcomes.
Oddly, I don't see Strossen or her peers throwing themselves in front of violent mobs in an attempt to bring them to moral clarity. Having at various times been arrested, attacked, beaten by a mob, and beaten by cops while engaged in wholly non-violent political activity, I do not give much weight to pure idealism that isn't grounded in cold hard reality.
This brings me back to your first link, which complains about transgender extremism and was ironically published on the f...
> It's hard for me to take you seriously when the issue you complain about at such length involves so little hardship.
It seems you feel that secretive online censorship is not a big deal. I don't see the point in trying to convince you. Plenty of other people, such as those I quoted here [1], do care.
If you'd like me to respond further, please narrow it down to a question or two.
A shadowban has the property that it's hidden from the user. Elon seems to want to make these kinds of actions transparent, like, for instance, deboosted tweets being visible as deboosted by their creator/other users, which is a pretty big difference. This difference is already visible in initial intent: Twitter hid what they were doing https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1022658436704731136, while Elon is explicitly saying what he will do.
> We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.
It specifically mentions factoring in user behavior:
>What actions you take on Twitter (e.g. who you follow, who you retweet, etc)
> How other accounts interact with you (e.g. who mutes you, who follows you, who retweets you, who blocks you, etc)
Sure, there was human involvement. Seems irrelevant to the comment I was responding to - Twitter did not hide that they were deranking some Tweets and there doesn't seem to be any difference between their current policy 'revealed' in the Twitter Files and what Elon proposed.
I think the issue is not that this feature exists, but that it was abused to silence criticisms primarily from the right, while at the same time twitter denied this.
Because people can see that their message that used to get x retweets and likes, is now only getting y which is far less. It is very common to see people complain about being shadow banned on twitter, and not knowing for what, or why.
Okay, so that gets us to “it seems that my account has been shadowbanned.”
Has someone compiled a dataset of users that appear to be shadowbanned, that tweet political content at least some of the time, as well as the political lean they have?
> people can see that their message that used to get x retweets and likes, is now only getting y which is far less.
If we go up to the top comment in this chain we see
> Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
- Elon Musk
So... you're in agreement?
(btw, this isn't shadowbanning. Shadow banning would be 0 likes and 0 retweets and 0 views)
> t is very common to see people complain about being shadow banned on twitter, and not knowing for what, or why.
Actually this is my entire complaint with these Twitter Files. They show examples of people getting delisted but do not show the tweets that led to these decisions. That is a CRITICAL element of the story. We can't determine if Twitter was acting in good faith or not without this knowledge. We also have no idea if these examples are selection biased or not. Probably since there's only right leaning stuff and thefp.com is a right wing organization. Maybe Twitter does have a left bias (it probably does) but we sure aren't getting a fair shake.
He's going to speedrun learning moderation from "first principles". And we get to watch him learn (just like when he started banning people who changed their handle to mock him).
> Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal
Reddit shows all removed comments to authors as if they're publicly visible [8]
Open source tools are built to do it [9] [10]
Textbooks advocate "disguise a gag or ban" [11]
I call it Shadow Moderation [12]. The system intentionally does not show users the ways in which their content has been actioned. The solution is simple— provide users with the same view that the moderating system has. Whenever their content has been actioned, let users see it.
It may be the result of two groups who fail to connect. Those who don't want any censorship at all, and those who want disinformation to be handled by the platform. If there is no olive branch and no concession made between these two positions, then platform designers may seek to satisfy both by secretly actioning content.
If there is now wide understanding that this happens everywhere, maybe we have a chance to build a platform whose express goal is to not withhold censorship actions from the author of the content.
>If there is now wide understanding that this happens everywhere, maybe we have a chance to build a platform whose express goal is to not withhold censorship actions from the author of the content.
I want to know what rock people have been living under all this time, that this sort of thing is news to them.
> ...what is the supposed rationale for making you think a removed post is still live and visible?
> ...So the mods delete comments, but have them still visible to the writer. How sinister.
> ...what’s stunning is you get no notification and to you the comment still looks up. Which means mods can set whatever narrative they want without answering to anyone.
> ...Wow. Can they remove your comment and it still shows up on your side as if it wasn't removed?
I think to a lot of people who pay attention to this sort of thing (eg the crowd already familiar with tools like reveddit) might not be a shock but it is a rare case of it being admitted in clear terms with specific examples which correspond to the sorts of claims that are often dismissed as rumors by third parties. While not anywhere near as high profile, it's kind of like how anyone who was paying attention probably had a decent idea of the kind of surveillance governments might be engaging in, but it was still a big deal when Snowden released the documents making it undeniable.
As the thread says, Twitter used a bit of trickery by calling it "visibility filtering" so they could lean on the technicality that "we do not shadow ban", because they too preferred to leave in some plausible deniability.
Shadowbanning only works because it is news to people. That's the whole point. People aware of shadowbanning can easily check their posts from a private browser window or similar to see if they exist.
If it wasn't news to people, then no companies would use it, because it would be ineffective!
The existence of shadowbanning, much less fine-grained moderator manipulation,'secret blacklists' or opaque moderator actions shouldn't be news to people, certainly not here. Much of the outrage around this, like much of the outrage in the 2000+ comment dumpster fire that is the previous and still ongoing "Twitter Files" thread, is manufactured for political purposes.
Like yes, social media platforms can moderate content and decide how it appears, or doesn't appear, under whatever arbitrary criteria they want, and they don't need your approval first. That isn't news at eleven, I guarantee it was spelled out in the terms of service no one ever bothered to read.
Its newsworthy because Twitter has been publicly denying that shadowbanning has been in place, and they've denied that preferential treatment based on preferences of internal teams has been in place. Both of those are now being shown to be false statements. Glossing over that fact is a great disservice to the conversation.
That's not the only newsworthy element. Saying that would gloss over the pervasive use of this secretive feature.
The use of this stuff is probably in the companies' terms of use, patents etc. The public is still largely unaware that it happens, as evidenced with Twitter.
Also newsworthy because it's used to hold certain accounts down and to hijack ideas and talking points from less popular accounts on a regular basis as well.
These features regularly can be used to keep certain accounts popular and profitable while others get blacklisted unfairly and with no awareness.
There is nothing to stop large platforms from using shadowban features to fuel corrupt activity for profit and influence if they continue to operate in non-transparent ways like this.
That's likely because .win has a terrible reputation due to the number of shitty websites on that TLD. I would personally prefer to spend a few $ more to avoid creating an unnecessary negative impression.
The point is people won't notice this because Twitter doesn't tell you your tweet was hidden.
Does it make sense for Twitter to shadow remove tweets from a whole TLD? The fact that it needs to be done secretly is evidence that most users don't know that using such a TLD will "create a negative impression".
I don't think it 'needs' to be done secretly so much as big companies cannot be bothered to get into fights over every moderation, and find i more economical to avoid legal liability by not saying anything at all. They don't bind themselves with any promises to do so in their user agreement (which is naturally tilted fully in their favor, since their most avid users are not their customers, as such), and a calculated indifference means less overhead than clear communication. Is that infuriating to some people? Sure, but it's how a lot of businesses operate because it's in their economic interest.
Again, you're not a customer. The advertisers and data brokers are the customers. Keeping this in mind is why I lose little sleep over being shadowbanned and having my visibility limited on social media.
> I don't think it 'needs' to be done secretly so much as big companies cannot be bothered to get into fights over every moderation
And then you get into a situation where it can be alleged that a whole political ideology, half the country, has been sidelined by your secretive work.
Short term, that worked for awhile. It is not a long term strategy.
> you're not a customer
Users are part of the product. Lying to them en masse is not a good way to build trust.
> The advertisers and data brokers are the customers. Keeping this in mind is why I lose little sleep over being shadowbanned and having my visibility limited on social media.
I guess you've never tried to say something that the majority didn't want you to say, as has happened many times throughout history, from the Spanish Inquisition to Anthony Comstock to Communism to McCarthy to the Civil Rights Era.
Free expression is held in regard not just when dealing with government, but also when dealing with each other. Shouting over each other isn't considered civil discourse, and neither is censorship wherever it occurs, in private or public places.
I guess you've never tried to say something that the majority didn't want you to say
I've been jailed twice, stabbed, kicked in the head, had my ribs broken, and hit with a wide variety of chemical agents, at the hands of both police and mobs, all while engaged in non-violent political activity. To me, you sound naïve, at best.
Thank you for your terminology. I will now go out into the world and discuss your term, "shadow moderation", at length with my fellow peers. We need more independent thinkers like you in the world.
> Reddit shows all removed comments to authors as if they're publicly visible [8]
This is not true. There are cases where comments are silently removed without any public indicator; To the author, it appears as if the comment is posted normally. To other accounts however, there is no indication that the comment was ever posted.
There may be some wires crossed here. Reddit does show all removed comments to the people who wrote them as if they're not removed. I built Reveddit to reveal this. You can lookup a random user with this link [1]. There's a 50% chance they have a removed comment in their recent history, and chances are they weren't told that it was removed.
> To other accounts however, there is no indication that the comment was ever posted.
This is another important detail, so thank you for bringing it up. Removed leaf comments (comments with no children) do not show any marker at all. I mention it in my talk at 1:23 [2],
> Note that other users only see one marker here. They are not shown a marker for replies that have no children. So there is no indication to them that there was even a second comment here. The vast majority of removed comments fall into this category.
Anything removed automatically for containing a phrase or link from a subreddit's ban list has no chance of receiving a reply.
Thanks for your support! I think it's self evident that transparency is a better idea, at least the case of content moderation. The other way, full control via opacity, doesn't work out. You have to remove what you don't like, then remove comments that discuss what was removed, and so on.
Thank you for pointing this out, I never realized just how many of my comments had been removed in this way! Pretty freaky considering how many of them were simply just citations / sources for things. I was honestly under the impression that my 10yo account never had a comment removed until now.
I use reveddit a lot on threads but never thought to use it on my own account. Thank you for making such a useful tool!
> I use reveddit a lot on threads but never thought to use it on my own account. Thank you for making such a useful tool!
No sweat. FYI there's also an extension for alerts, linked below. My main goal was to alert people to their own removed content. I'd love to know if there's a better way to route users in this direction. There's currently a little note in a blue box that appears if you've never visited a user page.
Shadowbans have existed for literally 40+ years. There have been multiple forums, platforms, channels, BBSes which try to make an egalitarian system where moderation is clear and transparent. These systems all universally fail because it fails to function at scale or it becomes easily gamed by bad faith posters or it falls apart because you get the truly fixated and toxic posters that tear your community apart.
The problem is you assume every actor is rational. That they all want to simply post in good faith. The moment you make that assumption you become a fool, someone that will be manipulated and controlled. You will get people gaslighting you into thinking they're the heroes while they've been sending threats of violence to other members of your community.
There is no good solution. I doubt there will ever be a good solution because it's trying to solve an inherent problem in the human condition.
It would be useful to have a somewhat in-depth visual of Twitter's engineering architecture along with an explanation of exactly where in the system these 'visibility filters' were implemented. There's also mention of an 'amplification block' which makes one wonder just how natural the phenomenon of a post 'going viral' really was in the past.
Twitter claimed to be a user-driven platform (not counting bots of course) where user actions would dictate what was popular and what went viral, but now there are some questions about just how controlled such events were. Questions like "How much of the this was stage-managed?" and "How much was bot-driven?" deserve answers.
Sorry about off topic but am I banned on top pages of HN? Or is this topic filtered?
Recently I don't see this thread on the first 10 pages. Now it's appeared on page 7. It should be more visible with the number of upvote and comment, shouldn't it?
Topic is being downvoted/flagged, I assume. Normally HN loves tech company drama. And there are screenshots of twitter accounts from the employee/moderator tooling. It's super interesting stuff, even just technically.
We don't have any interest in censoring this—it's being moderated the same way we moderate anything else in this category, regardless of which way the political vectors point.
You guys are cherry-picking a tiny and arbitrary sample of datapoints—i.e. what you happen to notice, when you happen to be looking, which is (1) a tiny time sample, and (2) strongly influenced by how you feel about the story. Other people who look at different times and/or feel differently notice different things and come to completely different conclusions. Then you (some of you, at least!) turn those unreliable, sample-biased and feeling-influenced observations into flaming arrows and fire them at the mods—the same mods, btw, who turned off the flags on the story in the first place.
This is interesting... I believe you that no one at HN is putting their thumbs on the scale here. But I suspect what's happening is community censorship by "hivemind" like a post on reddit critical of Democrats getting downvoted to 0 in r/politics by the community because many of them are. Or actual nazis getting praise on 4chan...
Why is tech overwhelmingly Democrat-donating/leaning? Even more interesting, perhaps.. There are 4-5 companies with a significant Republican presence, but at first glance I can't figure out what they have in common. Oracle? Old company. Intel? Old company. HP? Old company. Uber. WTF? And not Salesforce?! Not even eBay. Neither tech nor company age explain the majority.
There's a sociological phenomenon here I lack the skills/data to figure out, but it is very interesting.
Read HN through Serializer.io, HN homepage is heavily brigaded for years already, completely unusable full of nonsense. You would be better off even reading TOP 24 hours posts through besthackernews.herokuapp.com though I prefer chronological order at Serializer to see new items and it can also sync through unique URL across devices
Sadly, many don't even notice full account shadowbans [1] [2].
But account-level shadowbans are sort of known to exist. What's being reported here is harder to detect. That is, the secretive removal of individual pieces of content, or reducing the reach of an account's content.
How did you even find it? I only found it trying to submit it because I didn't see it. And HN loves posting dirt on tech companies here - understandably so - because a lot of it is highly technical. So this being absent is really suspicious.
Like, I'd love to know how they implemented the "Trends Blacklist". In the years older leak I had assumed that it was on the trending terms, but Weiss revealed that it was targeting people and tweets.
Or the "Search blacklist". That's basically sabotaging your own search function so that things that are popular/relevant/trending are hidden. That makes no sense for an platform to even do for anything other than censorship of people on purpose.
Or what does "Do Not Amplify" do? Does that mean they do amplify other things, but never want these accounts to be amplified by that process? How was that implemented?
Musk just tweeted: "Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal"
That'll be good to see. Exposing this stuff to the people affected is just...good faith interaction with your users. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be justifiably mad. I wonder what this will do to twitter's stock price...
When you submit with the same link, HN brings you to the post.
I'm pretty into this topic, having spent the last four years trying to raise awareness about it. First I thought it was only one political side abusing it, then I thought it was only Reddit, and this summer I realized it was happening on every platform. I suppose others have known for longer but FWIW this is a talk I gave on what I know [1], and an HN discussion on it [2]. See also my other comment in this thread about where else it happens [3].
It's hard to figure out how to tell the story about what's going on because it keeps expanding. I've learned something new about this almost every day for a long time. I think it does boil down to a single point though, which may be treat others how you want to be treated. That doesn't always win out in the real world, but it does when the issue is big enough.
Indeed he did suggest "free speech doesn't equal free reach".
If we're now saying that statement is bad then we should hold his feet to the fire. Conflicting statements doesn't mean there is no principle to espouse; it just means there are conflicting statements.
...which is why I avoid HN homepage and read it through Serializer.io (set only HN content) which also allows syncing through unique URL across devices.
HN homepage is incredibly brigaded, but since it's in line with admins opinions they don't do anything about it.
Discrimination as alleged by conservatives but pooh-poohed as others as merely delusional is now clearly proved.
How can tech self-regulate itself, or should there be external agencies who would watch the growing power of tech companies? and who would watch them?
Decentralization never seems to take off, so we seem to be left with these existing players like twitter, meta, google ...who are de-facto monopolies....
“The people I disagree with politically can have free speech in the mediums that have the least reach while my political tribe will freely exercise our speech on the mediums with the most reach” is a bad faith argument I keep hearing from fake leftists who are really hardline authoritarians.
The mediums which have the most reach have the most reach explicitly because they have less spam porn hate and crazy. If twitter gets more "democratic" more crazy, more hateful, less desirable and less popular shall we suggest the next big platform welcome an equal number of undesirables?
The problem is that for a lot of people “hate and crazy” is a euphemism for “political ideas I disagree with”.
This isn’t new or original. Anyone can classify their political opponents as crazy, dumb, misguided, “hateful” is the new one, ignorant, *ist.
I think a healthier framing is, people who disagree with me politically have their reasons for doing so and the best for everyone is if we have a dialog.
You are free to run your own website if you don't like your placement in trending topics or users feeds kind of like you can share your videos on your blog if ABC wont carry it.
So I see the term fascist being thrown around against conservatives frequently on sites like Reddit and I just chalk it up to people on sites like that not really knowing what the term means.
HN to me is different. I fully expect people to understand and mean what they say here.
So I'd like to know from a fellow HNer what exactly do you mean by calling "these" people fascists and who exactly are these fascists? Do you literally believe these people whoever they may be are actual textbook definition fascists? If so, why?
It's a strange hyperbole isn't it. Same as when people are accused of being "hateful" and "spreading hate" just for voicing a dissenting opinion on some controversial topics, without any hate involved at all.
There are literal fascists within the alt-right, and the conservatives as a whole have failed to distance themselves sufficiently from them.
“If there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.”
Nick Fuentes is a fascist. He has complimented Hitler and Putin - even saying the media comparing Putin to Hitler “as if that wasn't a good thing.” He holds a variety of other repugnant views which are tightly associated with fascism and Nazis.
When Ye and Nick Fuentes (an actual fascist) have dinner with a leader of a party, and that party didn’t immediately abandon that leader, they all qualify under the 11 Nazi’s category. See also: no abandonment or even major pushback against the leader saying “very fine people” were chanting “blood and soil” at Charlottesville etc.
[edit] also in the context of social media moderation, most people moderated hold extreme views, so when talking about conservatives who have been moderated, they are more likely to be fascist. Same as how of moderated left users, they are more likely to be Stalinist’s or other extreme groups when compared to the left population as a whole.
The difference is, sometimes when conservatives have complained about moderation, the examples given were of prominent alt-right fascist adjacent figures being banned. Christian Nationalists and White Nationalists are fundamentally fascists, but some of them are defended in cultural wars by a good chunk of conservative voices. E.g. Alex Jones received conservative op-Ed’s in his support when he lost a lawsuit.
The Nazis went from a fringe political movement to a solid minority voice (with 20% of the seats and about 33% of the vote). Then came the Reichstag Fire and heavy repression of opposition - getting them to 44% of votes in a “free” election. And then came the Enabling Act and there were no more votes.
What this saying means ultimately is that enabling fascism via silence makes people anti-democratic. It does not take many people passively sitting out of the way for authoritarian regimes to take power - and they are only removed by the bullet box not the ballot box.
I will note I can’t find the providence for this saying actually existing in post WW2 Germany and it is likely a modern invention. It is nonetheless a true sentiment of some of the soul searching German and other fascist ruled societies made after WW2.
> a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.
Lets take Trump, since you asked for a specific example. Certainly this criteria applies to Trumpists be definition, libs of TT, etc:
[x] America first (nationalism)
[x] Attempts to discredit elections and strong arm state officials (centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader)
[x] Build the wall (severe economic and social regimentation, racist)
[x] Muslim ban (severe economic and social regimentation, racist)
[x] Undermining the free press (forcible suppression of opposition)
[x] January 6th (forcible suppression of opposition)
[x] Telling the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by...Somebody's got to do something about antifa and the left" (forcible suppression of opposition, racist)
Pretty hyperbolic. When I think of a dictatorial leader, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pol Pot, NK's Kims, Putin come to mind.[0]
Did Trump (or any US leadership past or present) wield that kind of violent and absolute power over government and people?
> severe economic and social regimentation
Again, I think of NK, China's treatment of Uighurs, their Covid lockdown policy, etc.
The left and right have different ideas on what is good for the nation and they have some commonalities too. I think this is healthy. What's not healthy is demonizing the other side because of different perspectives and beliefs.
Ironically, this demonizing of other groups is actually more akin to fascism (not calling anyone fascist, just pointing out the irony in this case) as that is the strategy used against the opposition by real fascists. E.g. Hitler towards Jews.
On Reddit, the language used against anyone not aligning with the Left is downright scary and dehumanizing. [1]
[0] Dictator: a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has obtained control by force.
To me the evidence seems to point to the opposite, like the screenshot of LibsOfTikTok: that account was being shielded from moderation action by a warning note saying not to act without speaking to a superior first. Sounds like the account was at benefit, not detriment.
You think that was to protect them? I figured it was because they didn’t want any heavy handed actions to be “misinterpreted” as them putting their finger on the scale. Those actions required more political finesse.
They specifically said in their communications that LibsOfTikTok hadn’t violated any rules directly. Why the suspensions then?
Everyone is heir to the same inherent flaws that plague humanity but smart people are less likely to practice self deception.
If you find yourself on average on the opposite side of the vast majority of smart people the first thing that is in order is self refection. While being smart doesn't make them correct the last thing that would be useful would be to dismiss the majority of smart folks.
smarter people are deceived by different things but they are no less subject to propaganda. one of the propaganda points that works against all people is "you are in the club of smart people, let me let you in on some things most people either dont know, or dont want to know!"
So since their concerned have been proven justified, they don't get to talk about them because of their tone when they first raised the concern? They weren't crying wolf. They were right the whole time, which honestly justifies the howling to me.
Sorry, I don't agree with your premise. When I see a quantitative analysis backing up conservatives' claims that they're unfairly discriminated against, I'd consider it valid.
I feel like HN is pretty close to being the most balanced 'techie' social platform I've come across. I very often see discussions here which surprise me in that talking about them on Twitter, Reddit (in a similar community) etc would handily get your post deleted/banned/hidden. One that comes to mind is discussions about vaccine effectiveness data without either polarized extreme being dominant (ie no one acting like it's a sin to even question it and no one acting like it's some secret plot to spread autism for some reason).
>apparently it has to be on the front page or you are violating the first amendment rights of those who want it on the front page!
This is a ridiculous strawman fallacy. HN loves gossip about tech companies getting caught doing things all of the other times it has happened. Hundreds of comments and upvotes on each one. But not this time? What's the difference?
There must be a ton of ex (or current) Twitter employees on HN: can one of you verify if the user management tool shown in the photos is an actual thing and provide more information on how it works?
There must be a ton of ex (or current) Twitter employees on HN: can one of you verify if the user management tool shown in the photos is an actual thing and provide more information on how it works?
As another sibling comment states, other platforms also do similar things. It's easy how such systems get started and evolve. In fact, given the severe downvoting I see on this and similarly polarizing threads on HN, I think if someone built a browser extension that hides comments by users from a user created list many people HN users would probably use it.
A more pressing question, IMO: one of the screenshots shows a “direct messages” button. Does Weiss and/or Taibbi have unrestricted access to read users DMs right now?
Or anyone he considers his enemy/detractor. Anyone who has ever exchanged words with Elon, or even looked him the wrong way better have deleted their DMs - and asked their counter-parties to do the same - before Musk walked in the door at Twitter HQ. Let that sink in.
deleted dms likely mean nothing, they probably just get marked in the db as 'deleted' and not displayed on normal clients... but to the elon/admin client no such restrictions
The 2020 article that you linked only mentions an internal tool that was used to change email addresses, it does not mention visibility filtering at all, which I believe is the new thing here.
why do you want to distract readers with BS like access controls imposed on the journalists?
the head of twitter security testified to Congress how twitter had poor security controls and audibility across the company. If that button does allow ability to read DM, Twitter employees have surely abused that for ages without repercussions.
Let’s stay focused on the important details rather than worrying about established journalists exposing the power the former twitter employees wielded to sway public opinion
> If that button does allow ability to read DM, Twitter employees have surely abused that for ages without repercussions.
How many employees have access to the tool? Do all users see that button? Seems pretty likely they’d have tiered access levels, no? What if access to user DMs was a hugely restricted piece of functionality and Musk just said “screw it” and gave it to two non-employees on a whim?
You’re writing off a potentially huge breach in user trust, not to mention legal repercussions.
You’re running some tired schtick here. How is what I said “fake news”? If Musk opened up DM access to two non-employees that is a huge legal liability. You haven’t actually countered that point with anything, you’ve just waffled.
You’ve also not explained why an audience like HN is incapable of discussing multiple issues in a discussion forum. Do you really think everyone here is so dumb?
Let’s be real here: you don’t want any discussion that strays from the talking points dished out by Weiss because such discussion would show her talking points are largely nonsense. The Twitter Files is a house of cards but as long as the right people keep saying it isn’t the audience will keep huffing it like glue.
> "Our team was given extensive, unfiltered access to Twitter's internal communications and systems"
One of the journalists in question. Also the wording in your tweets leaves some wriggle room:
> For security purposes, the screenshots requested [...]
Are we going to get some transparency from Twitter about exactly what tools/communications were accessible by the journalists in question? Otherwise this seems to be an exact repeat of what Twitter has already been doing for years, except now it's a private company and accountable to only one absurdly rich individual.
Love to see non-employees of Twitter having access to my DMs. I don't think that's consistent with the user agreement or the privacy laws in the state of California.
I don't think they even have access to the dashboard. I assumed they were given the prepared data. An earlier tweet by Musk or a journalist mentioned lawyers would deliver the data to them direct from Twitter.
Even if they did it's clear that whoever made the screenshot in the libsoftiktok screen doesn't even have access to see their email. Like all other tech admin panels, there are access controls. Just because the 'delete website' button is visible to you doesn't mean your account has permission to use it.
Weiss's co-author @abagailshrier commented: 'Our team was given extensive, unfiltered access to Twitter's internal communication and systems.' I'm gonna take this at face value pending clarification.
Just because the 'delete website' button is visible to you doesn't mean your account has permission to use it.
Well, nothing looks greyed out. Again, I'm going to assume they had access unless there's specific information to the contrary.
It's a bit of a mess really. Musk fired the deputy general counsel the other day, commenting shortly afterward that he had only learned about the man's previous stint in a similar role at the FBI on Sunday. People quickly pointed out that Musk had actually commented on the tweets about that person and his FBI connections last April.
I feel that what we're seeing is largely investigation theater designed to validate a particular outcome rather than a real inquiry. If you consider this from an information/hybrid warfare point of view and think of Twitter as territory, then it's reminiscent of highly engineered plebiscites that precede or follow invasions to give them an aura of legitimacy.
If you defined "that" in "every social network does that" for HN and the other major social media sites, you'd realize just how different the definitions are. The differences matter.
It's surprising when you see it happen to your own content. Check out the reactions from people whose content has been secretly moderated that I quote here [1]
These aren't far right or left, it's everyone. Likely all of us have been secretly moderated at some point without our knowledge.
When I discovered this happening on the platform I used, I built a tool to let me know when it happened, and I published that tool for others to use. Now it sees 500k users per month. Similar tools could be built for all other sites that do this.
"There's no evidence people and tweets are being suppressed"
<Shows Evidence with receipts>
"This is old news, nothing new here."
Is there a mailing list where these things are coordinated? I remember there was JournoList in the late 2000s, so is there a new one for internet commenters of a certain political persuasion? How do they get the talking points memo?
> "There's no evidence people and tweets are being suppressed"
Wait, where is this one?
I'm sorry, but it doesn't take coordination to know that shadowbans exist. It's spoken openly on Twitter, there are tools to test accounts, etc. It's not surprising because it's open knowledge. No political persuasion necessary to be in the know here.
> Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
A glance at political contributions of Twitter employees at 99.7% to one party gives you a very strong prior in what the political leaning of random Twitter employees to be.
The same coordination network which was used to agree that the first drop's response had to include "doing PR for the world's richest man", the same phrase magically repeated by a dozen establishment journalists.
The same thing happened with negative coverage of the tech industry by the mainstream media. Journalists kept acting like tech people were just being paranoid about the media. Then recently Yglesias casually tweeted that there was a topdown directive for negative coverage, and acted like it was no big deal and everyone should have known.
It may not even be those with strong opinions on the topic that are flagging this. I think some may flag topics they see as potentially inflammatory as a means to avoid flamewars, uncivil discourse, etc.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Fascinating to see how the comment section is skewed only by the people who are invested enough in this melodrama to have come running to HN to discuss the thread. Will be interesting to see how it shakes out when the rest of the world wakes up.
No offense, but pretty much everyone outside America is already awake long time ago, especially the buggest part of world population living in Asia. Whole America has like 1/5 of Asia population.
I think you should refresh your time zones knowledge.
But yeah, Northamerican leftists are not awake yet.
577 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadWhat. Why?
Next, I wonder, but don’t care enough to look it up, if this guy is adequately summarized by only mentioning his concern for children?
Screw that, I did look him up: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya#COVID-19_pa.... He was one of the people behind the “Great” Barrington Declaration and, kn the early months of the pandemic, argued, among other things, that COVID is rather harmless. He also took money from the airline industry without disclosing as much in his publications.
It’s arguable if Bhattacharya’s reach needed to be limited. What’s really hard to argue is that the thing about children is an adequate characterization of his statements during the pandemic. This is prime evidence that this story is not presenting anything close to a fair interpretation of the documents they have been given, and that you have, unfortunately, fallen for it.
Even if they weren't, this would still be unacceptable.
What’s not debatable is that the breathless outrage-bait under discussion misrepresented the case for limiting the Dr’s reach with a straw-man argument, and so did you.
Could you help me understand what the argument is that this person should have been put on any form of blacklist?
medical & public health scientists: 15,989
medical practitioners: 47,278
concerned citizens: 870,827
The list of medical practitioners and scientists includes a number of homeopaths and obvious fake names.
You're off by an order of magnitude and then some. Also, none of the numbers they do claim are verifiable. https://gbdeclaration.org/view-signatures/
You know, when you make a specific claim like that it's really worth the 30 seconds it takes to check it again to verify your memory is correct.
>“It’s shaping up to be one of the highest-impact things that we’ve done,” the chief executive, Jack Dorsey ,said of the update, which will change how tweets appear in search results or conversations. “The spirit of the thing is that we want to take the burden off the person receiving abuse or mob-like behavior.”
> The new system will use behavioral signals to assess whether a Twitter account is adding to – or detracting from – the tenor of conversations...
> The updated algorithm will result in certain tweets being pushed further down in a list of search results or replies, but will not delete them from the platform.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/15/twitter-r...
These screenshots are about actions taken by Twitter employees, not an updated algorithm.
It's hard to make people care about this stuff. Most of us only start to see the harm of something when it's shown in context. Just showing that something can be theoretically harmful isn't enough.
The question is not what is getting demoted, it's how. In this case, it's being done secretly, and Twitter isn't the only one doing it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916414
It isn't accurate to say secrecy increases site quality. No such qualitative study has been done.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/duwdco/should_mode...
More than 95% of the time I see a flagged account on HN, they post complete garbage that leads to more flaming replies if not removed promptly. HN has a very limited set of moderators, like one or two, who cannot police every comment 24/7.
>Discourse doesn't secretly remove content and is popular.
Popular where? In corporate and niche business use cases? What are some public Discourses that allow everyone to post?
Shadow moderation was implemented without doing any research. I agree it's about time more studies are done on all types of content and all platforms in order to assess whether or not this functionality furthers the platforms' goals.
> Couldn't read the PDF because the link is broken
Good call. Blog post summarizing [1] and pdf [2]
> Popular where? In corporate and niche business use cases? What are some public Discourses that allow everyone to post?
All of them that don't use the ShadowBan add-on, I guess.
Indeed shadow moderation appears to have made platforms more popular. I won't disagree there. But I also think it's clear it has contributed to echo chambers and increased isolation and tribality.
I think we're reaching a point where the public wants to know what's going on in social media. Its harmful nature is not just driven by preference-driven news feeds, which we already know can be toxic, it's also driven by shadow moderation. That's the other shoe that may be dropping here.
[1] https://medium.com/acm-cscw/does-transparency-in-moderation-...
[2] https://shagunjhaver.com/research/articles/jhaver-2019-trans...
You could have just use the menu to find it, it only took a few seconds. There's a preprint available there if you need it. https://shagunjhaver.com/research/
I've been arrested and kept in jail overnight on false charges for being a political activist, people complaining about being in Twitter or facebook jail don't impress me much (especially when almost all of them have a backup account).
And where are you that it is illegal to be a political activist?
I am glad that you agree that this is such a huge problem, and it is a good thing that now more people are away of how extensive it is.
Try working in integrity for a few years, you'll realise why these things are necessary, because people just won't stop being jerks.
So my point stands.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm...
Does 90% equal 100% now?
Her statement was false, even based on the limited data set you're referencing. It's even more false now.
Behold, humanity.
That's a problem.
Idiots on the Internet are free to do so, but not the Director of the CDC or the US President. That gets people killed.
No Googling necessary. It's right there in the article you linked to.
https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/16010379837793894...
Slowing some children's development (while drastically accelerating others' because they were tutored by their parents who had to stay at home with them) is not even on the same scale as mass deaths and people dying outside hospitals due to lack of capacity.
The episodic format of this - alongside being forced into exclusive twitter threads when it would be much more easily understood as a longer article or series of paragraphs - also comes across as a pretty blatant and desperate attempt by Musk to make twitter "the #1 source of news"
https://twitter.com/spdustin/status/1601053327567249409
>New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.
>Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
>You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.
None of this info seems to warrant such a spectacle.
[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673339826212864
yes, it seems like twitter employees lied when asked directly about shadow banning and other issues.
Even if Twitter does the exact same actions, Musk will frame them all as"radical transparency"
Oh, wait!
Elon Musk, Nov 18th, 2022: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673339826212864Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet."
How is this any different than Elon's stated goals from 3 weeks ago?
Conservatives: Rope, tree, journalist: some assembly required
Fuck Joe Biden
Fuck your feelings
These are all t-shirt slogans you can buy at conservative political events, and they're quite widespread rather than exceptional.
Also conservatives: Why am I being shadow banned, this is viewpoint discrimination!
To be clear, there are obnoxious people and outright assholes all over the political spectrum. But conservatives have made outrage and offensiveness their brand, in recent years. I remember being astonished and disgusted by the gleeful antagonism of Rush Limbaugh back int eh 1990s when conservative talk radio first became A Thing following the Reagan administration's abolition of the 'Fairness doctrine.'
Both sides can certainly find a reason not to speak to each other. The left claims the right is hateful, the right claims the left is obscene. It's always been like that, with one having the power to censor the other.
Here's an example [1]. One side, a well known entrepeneur/investor, is arguing for no censorship, and the other side, a well known disinformation researcher [2], argues for limits of the reach of certain content. One has blocked the other, so they no longer communicate directly.
Five years ago, someone at Twitter might have observed this interaction and decided, "I'm going to secretly action content. That will satisfy both the disinfo labeler and the anti-censorship crowd." Yet in doing so, as we can see, nobody is satisfied. They're still not talking to each other, and they don't understand why. The reason is due to the secrecy built into all of these platforms where an unknown third party is actioning content without anyone involved in the conversation knowing about it.
See also Free speech for me--but not for thee : how the American left and right relentlessly censor each other [3] (Nat Hentoff, 1992)
[1] https://twitter.com/noUpside/status/1599532506252214272
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f...
[3] https://archive.org/details/freespeechformeb0000hent/page/n9...
Ther's no obligation to have dialog with others who are actively threatening to kill you. Don't owe them a conversation or even a hearing.
I don't disagree with your characterization that 'the left claims the right is hateful, the right claims the left is obscene.' But there is a clear qualitative difference between the two sides in terms of the willingness to insinuate, actually issue, and finally carry out death threats, and it's not a wholly new phenomenon. I put it to you that the people who are amused by and choose to promote messages like 'rope, tree, journalist: some assembly required' do not actually give a shit about free speech but are opportunistically employing the grievance for political leverage.
Get back to me on this when the right stops openly calling to murder people on such a frequent basis and I'll be happy to consider it in more abstract terms. I see why you're concerned about this, but having extensive first hand experience of political violence I think shadow bans are a relatively minor issue by comparison.
I never said there was. Even free speech law has limits and may punish such speech.
What I advocate is for authors of secretly removed content to be able to discover the removal, because even if the comment is vitriolic, the offending author may perceive the lack of a response as tacit approval of their words.
> But there is a clear qualitative difference between the two sides in terms of the willingness to insinuate, actually issue, and finally carry out death threats
Left wing extremists are currently saying that words are violence [1]. This is wrong, short of something that "in context, directly causes specific imminent serious harm", a definition from Nadine Strossen [2].
[1] https://archive.ph/1NeiV
[2] https://books.google.com/books?&hl=en&id=whBQDwAAQBAJ&q=in+c...
It’s the Republican, Trump-appointed, FBI director’s assessment that extremist right-wing political violence (read homegrown right-wing terrorism) is far and away a bigger problem than left-wing violence.
Jan 6 I hoped would have demonstrated that clearly once and for all. After that day, it has become impossible to “both sides” political violence in the US — it really is asymmetrically coming from the right.
Regarding shadow moderation, I can promise you that every side of every issue in every geography and on every major platform uses it. See the talk linked in my profile for examples.
It's been 20 years and Americans have finally recently stopped harping on about "9/11", after decades of them murdering orders of magnitudes more innocents. It's incredible to see them committing some of worst attrocities in the world and still loudly yell about their own tiny issues.
It's a little odd to me that you contemplate hypotheticals like 'perceiving the lack of response as tacit approval.' It's not that this is incorrect, but that you're overlooking evidence of the alternative: when platforms like Twitter or FB leave posts up (to gather both argument and support) but attach some sort of note saying 'this post might be disinformation' or words to that effect.
That is what you are asking for, no? A clear signal that the social media post is disfavored by the platform operator in some way, such that the author is notified and given some context, and so is everyone else. I would appreciate if you would clarify whether or not this meets your desired standard of transparency.
The reason I bring this up is that when this approach is applied, authors of the controversial posts tend to hate it and still scream that they're being censored by being publicly shamed, or having words inserted into their social media post by the platform operator (notwithstanding the extremely obvious distinction.. Twitter has gone farther again by allowing users to add meta-commentary in the form of notes (previously birdwatch), but on controversial topics said notes are often railed against by the original author or the subject of meta-controversy by people trying to spam the note system with negative characterizations of the notes themselves.
If you're going to make transparency of moderation into your political cause (and you very much seem to approach it this way), then I think you should go all the way and address the questions of why people are not happy even when they get what you are advocating for, and just pivot to a slightly different variation of the same argument about how they're being censored and it's a terrible injustice etc.
Incidentally the definition in your 2nd link is not from Nadine Strossen; it's just a restatement of the prevailing legal standard for incitement (from Brandenburg v. Ohio) and indeed seems to be offered as such in the text. Like the 'true threat' doctrine, this definition is being interpreted in increasingly elastic fashion in our era of instantaneous mass communication.
I'm familiar with Strossen's book but also consider it to be written from a comfortable suite in an ivory tower. Like many well-intentioned idealists, she acknowledges the possibility of violence but argues that it must be met by reasoned debate and nonviolent resistance. I reject this posture, because it basically says people who are the target of violence should accept their role as punching bugs (or targets of gunfire) in exchange for the possibility of moving the conscience of elites who review circumstances, form policy, render decisions, and recognize peers (eg accepting or rejecting the validity of other states). In this mode of argument, willingness to passively sacrifice oneself is the threshold of acceptability - becoming famous for your advocacy and then dying for it like Christ, King, or Gandhi is the way to go. And conveniently, once people are dead they can be cited as moral exemplars without the troubling possibility of them reappearing and critiquing subsequent outcomes.
Oddly, I don't see Strossen or her peers throwing themselves in front of violent mobs in an attempt to bring them to moral clarity. Having at various times been arrested, attacked, beaten by a mob, and beaten by cops while engaged in wholly non-violent political activity, I do not give much weight to pure idealism that isn't grounded in cold hard reality.
This brings me back to your first link, which complains about transgender extremism and was ironically published on the f...
It seems you feel that secretive online censorship is not a big deal. I don't see the point in trying to convince you. Plenty of other people, such as those I quoted here [1], do care.
If you'd like me to respond further, please narrow it down to a question or two.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916519
> We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.
It specifically mentions factoring in user behavior:
>What actions you take on Twitter (e.g. who you follow, who you retweet, etc)
> How other accounts interact with you (e.g. who mutes you, who follows you, who retweets you, who blocks you, etc)
How was Twitter hiding this?
[0]: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/...
It prevents nefarious actors from easily probing the limits of their content moderation processes.
It really is funny how Musk is just taking Twitter back to the start.
I haven't seen anything here that indicates that it ever did exist.
Limiting reach is different from people not seeing your content at all.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning
Has someone compiled a dataset of users that appear to be shadowbanned, that tweet political content at least some of the time, as well as the political lean they have?
If we go up to the top comment in this chain we see
> Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.
- Elon Musk
So... you're in agreement?
(btw, this isn't shadowbanning. Shadow banning would be 0 likes and 0 retweets and 0 views)
> t is very common to see people complain about being shadow banned on twitter, and not knowing for what, or why.
Actually this is my entire complaint with these Twitter Files. They show examples of people getting delisted but do not show the tweets that led to these decisions. That is a CRITICAL element of the story. We can't determine if Twitter was acting in good faith or not without this knowledge. We also have no idea if these examples are selection biased or not. Probably since there's only right leaning stuff and thefp.com is a right wing organization. Maybe Twitter does have a left bias (it probably does) but we sure aren't getting a fair shake.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601042125130371072
It is different because Elon's goals are at the level of tweets, and the screenshots here depict action at the level of users.
Facebook gives mods a "Hide comment" button [2]
TikTok calls it "visible to self" [3] [4]
Truth Social does it [5] [6] [7]
Reddit shows all removed comments to authors as if they're publicly visible [8]
Open source tools are built to do it [9] [10]
Textbooks advocate "disguise a gag or ban" [11]
I call it Shadow Moderation [12]. The system intentionally does not show users the ways in which their content has been actioned. The solution is simple— provide users with the same view that the moderating system has. Whenever their content has been actioned, let users see it.
It may be the result of two groups who fail to connect. Those who don't want any censorship at all, and those who want disinformation to be handled by the platform. If there is no olive branch and no concession made between these two positions, then platform designers may seek to satisfy both by secretly actioning content.
If there is now wide understanding that this happens everywhere, maybe we have a chance to build a platform whose express goal is to not withhold censorship actions from the author of the content.
[1] https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601014175366402048
[2] https://www.agorapulse.com/blog/hide-comments-on-facebook/#o...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-...
[4] https://netzpolitik.org/2019/cheerfulness-and-censorship/
[5] https://www.tiktok.com/@cheyenne.l.hunt/video/71115053899502...
[6] https://www.citizen.org/article/truth-cant-handle-the-truth/...
[7] https://www.tiktok.com/@cheyenne.l.hunt/video/71118581026385...
[8] https://www.reddit.com/r/CantSayAnything/comments/zdubov/wri...
[9] https://getstream.io/blog/feature-announcement-shadow-ban/
[10] https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-shadowban/85041
[11] https://kraut.hciresearch.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ki...
[12] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
I want to know what rock people have been living under all this time, that this sort of thing is news to them.
> ...what is the supposed rationale for making you think a removed post is still live and visible?
> ...So the mods delete comments, but have them still visible to the writer. How sinister.
> ...what’s stunning is you get no notification and to you the comment still looks up. Which means mods can set whatever narrative they want without answering to anyone.
> ...Wow. Can they remove your comment and it still shows up on your side as if it wasn't removed?
[1] https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/#react
As the thread says, Twitter used a bit of trickery by calling it "visibility filtering" so they could lean on the technicality that "we do not shadow ban", because they too preferred to leave in some plausible deniability.
If it wasn't news to people, then no companies would use it, because it would be ineffective!
Like yes, social media platforms can moderate content and decide how it appears, or doesn't appear, under whatever arbitrary criteria they want, and they don't need your approval first. That isn't news at eleven, I guarantee it was spelled out in the terms of service no one ever bothered to read.
The use of this stuff is probably in the companies' terms of use, patents etc. The public is still largely unaware that it happens, as evidenced with Twitter.
There is nothing to stop large platforms from using shadowban features to fuel corrupt activity for profit and influence if they continue to operate in non-transparent ways like this.
lol, you had me going for a moment there.
Interesting you bring this up though because tweets mentioning .win domains still get shadow removed, even today with the new owner.
This Tweet [1] only appears when directly linked. It does not appear beneath its parent [2] for anyone but me.
[1] https://twitter.com/rhaksw/status/1594103021407195136
[2] https://twitter.com/TheFIREorg/status/1594078057895063553
Does it make sense for Twitter to shadow remove tweets from a whole TLD? The fact that it needs to be done secretly is evidence that most users don't know that using such a TLD will "create a negative impression".
Again, you're not a customer. The advertisers and data brokers are the customers. Keeping this in mind is why I lose little sleep over being shadowbanned and having my visibility limited on social media.
And then you get into a situation where it can be alleged that a whole political ideology, half the country, has been sidelined by your secretive work.
Short term, that worked for awhile. It is not a long term strategy.
> you're not a customer
Users are part of the product. Lying to them en masse is not a good way to build trust.
> The advertisers and data brokers are the customers. Keeping this in mind is why I lose little sleep over being shadowbanned and having my visibility limited on social media.
I guess you've never tried to say something that the majority didn't want you to say, as has happened many times throughout history, from the Spanish Inquisition to Anthony Comstock to Communism to McCarthy to the Civil Rights Era.
Free expression is held in regard not just when dealing with government, but also when dealing with each other. Shouting over each other isn't considered civil discourse, and neither is censorship wherever it occurs, in private or public places.
I've been jailed twice, stabbed, kicked in the head, had my ribs broken, and hit with a wide variety of chemical agents, at the hands of both police and mobs, all while engaged in non-violent political activity. To me, you sound naïve, at best.
This is not true. There are cases where comments are silently removed without any public indicator; To the author, it appears as if the comment is posted normally. To other accounts however, there is no indication that the comment was ever posted.
> To other accounts however, there is no indication that the comment was ever posted.
This is another important detail, so thank you for bringing it up. Removed leaf comments (comments with no children) do not show any marker at all. I mention it in my talk at 1:23 [2],
> Note that other users only see one marker here. They are not shown a marker for replies that have no children. So there is no indication to them that there was even a second comment here. The vast majority of removed comments fall into this category. Anything removed automatically for containing a phrase or link from a subreddit's ban list has no chance of receiving a reply.
[1] https://www.reveddit.com/random
[2] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
I use reveddit a lot on threads but never thought to use it on my own account. Thank you for making such a useful tool!
No sweat. FYI there's also an extension for alerts, linked below. My main goal was to alert people to their own removed content. I'd love to know if there's a better way to route users in this direction. There's currently a little note in a blue box that appears if you've never visited a user page.
https://www.reveddit.com/add-ons/direct/
The problem is you assume every actor is rational. That they all want to simply post in good faith. The moment you make that assumption you become a fool, someone that will be manipulated and controlled. You will get people gaslighting you into thinking they're the heroes while they've been sending threats of violence to other members of your community.
There is no good solution. I doubt there will ever be a good solution because it's trying to solve an inherent problem in the human condition.
Twitter claimed to be a user-driven platform (not counting bots of course) where user actions would dictate what was popular and what went viral, but now there are some questions about just how controlled such events were. Questions like "How much of the this was stage-managed?" and "How much was bot-driven?" deserve answers.
Recently I don't see this thread on the first 10 pages. Now it's appeared on page 7. It should be more visible with the number of upvote and comment, shouldn't it?
The Twitter Files - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838556 - Dec 2022 (1549 comments)
The Twitter Files Part 2: Twitter's Secret Blacklists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33915734 - Dec 2022 (481 comments)
... and it's quite normal. It happens with every sensational or inflammatory story, especially the Major Ongoing Topic kind: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
We don't have any interest in censoring this—it's being moderated the same way we moderate anything else in this category, regardless of which way the political vectors point.
You guys are cherry-picking a tiny and arbitrary sample of datapoints—i.e. what you happen to notice, when you happen to be looking, which is (1) a tiny time sample, and (2) strongly influenced by how you feel about the story. Other people who look at different times and/or feel differently notice different things and come to completely different conclusions. Then you (some of you, at least!) turn those unreliable, sample-biased and feeling-influenced observations into flaming arrows and fire them at the mods—the same mods, btw, who turned off the flags on the story in the first place.
The media is ignoring or downplaying this story. Reddit is ignoring or downplaying this story. https://www.allsides.com/story/free-speech-second-twitter-fi... shows clear bias in covering the story.
It's kinda hard to argue that there's not a massive bias in big tech: https://i.imgur.com/taGzsZP.jpg
Why is tech overwhelmingly Democrat-donating/leaning? Even more interesting, perhaps.. There are 4-5 companies with a significant Republican presence, but at first glance I can't figure out what they have in common. Oracle? Old company. Intel? Old company. HP? Old company. Uber. WTF? And not Salesforce?! Not even eBay. Neither tech nor company age explain the majority.
There's a sociological phenomenon here I lack the skills/data to figure out, but it is very interesting.
It's only an hour old. The post must've been flagged, which I know has a pretty heavy influence on the ranking here.
For those flagging, this conversation is worth having. Whether platforms secretly demote people's content is important to them.
But account-level shadowbans are sort of known to exist. What's being reported here is harder to detect. That is, the secretive removal of individual pieces of content, or reducing the reach of an account's content.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/351buo/tifu_by_postin...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8z3sd4/i_have_used_red...
Like, I'd love to know how they implemented the "Trends Blacklist". In the years older leak I had assumed that it was on the trending terms, but Weiss revealed that it was targeting people and tweets.
Or the "Search blacklist". That's basically sabotaging your own search function so that things that are popular/relevant/trending are hidden. That makes no sense for an platform to even do for anything other than censorship of people on purpose.
Or what does "Do Not Amplify" do? Does that mean they do amplify other things, but never want these accounts to be amplified by that process? How was that implemented?
Musk just tweeted: "Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal"
That'll be good to see. Exposing this stuff to the people affected is just...good faith interaction with your users. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be justifiably mad. I wonder what this will do to twitter's stock price...
When you submit with the same link, HN brings you to the post.
I'm pretty into this topic, having spent the last four years trying to raise awareness about it. First I thought it was only one political side abusing it, then I thought it was only Reddit, and this summer I realized it was happening on every platform. I suppose others have known for longer but FWIW this is a talk I gave on what I know [1], and an HN discussion on it [2]. See also my other comment in this thread about where else it happens [3].
It's hard to figure out how to tell the story about what's going on because it keeps expanding. I've learned something new about this almost every day for a long time. I think it does boil down to a single point though, which may be treat others how you want to be treated. That doesn't always win out in the real world, but it does when the issue is big enough.
[1] https://cantsayanything.win/2022-10-transparent-moderation/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475391
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916414
I saw it in the HN Telegram feed. Stories that get taken down here remain on the feed.
https://t.me/hacker_news_feed
It is an important topic but the Twitter thread linked is not a particularly useful resource. For one, none of this is new information:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-acces...
That it’s being brought out now with such fanfare smells like corporate propaganda.
It is news to many when social media takes action against content without telling the author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916519
If we're now saying that statement is bad then we should hold his feet to the fire. Conflicting statements doesn't mean there is no principle to espouse; it just means there are conflicting statements.
HN homepage is incredibly brigaded, but since it's in line with admins opinions they don't do anything about it.
How can tech self-regulate itself, or should there be external agencies who would watch the growing power of tech companies? and who would watch them?
Decentralization never seems to take off, so we seem to be left with these existing players like twitter, meta, google ...who are de-facto monopolies....
Would it be a stretch to suggest 'the government'?
I'm from the US though so not an expert or it's laws.
Similar laws could be expanded to other major communication platforms.
This isn’t new or original. Anyone can classify their political opponents as crazy, dumb, misguided, “hateful” is the new one, ignorant, *ist.
I think a healthier framing is, people who disagree with me politically have their reasons for doing so and the best for everyone is if we have a dialog.
> your bs
I have no dog in the fight.
> twitter users don't want to engage with
The country, however, is pretty evenly divided along ideological lines so there is no homogeneous "twitter users" group.
I am, but that doesn’t solve the problem with Twitter manipulating our elections, does it?
HN to me is different. I fully expect people to understand and mean what they say here.
So I'd like to know from a fellow HNer what exactly do you mean by calling "these" people fascists and who exactly are these fascists? Do you literally believe these people whoever they may be are actual textbook definition fascists? If so, why?
“If there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.”
Nick Fuentes is a fascist. He has complimented Hitler and Putin - even saying the media comparing Putin to Hitler “as if that wasn't a good thing.” He holds a variety of other repugnant views which are tightly associated with fascism and Nazis.
When Ye and Nick Fuentes (an actual fascist) have dinner with a leader of a party, and that party didn’t immediately abandon that leader, they all qualify under the 11 Nazi’s category. See also: no abandonment or even major pushback against the leader saying “very fine people” were chanting “blood and soil” at Charlottesville etc.
[edit] also in the context of social media moderation, most people moderated hold extreme views, so when talking about conservatives who have been moderated, they are more likely to be fascist. Same as how of moderated left users, they are more likely to be Stalinist’s or other extreme groups when compared to the left population as a whole.
The difference is, sometimes when conservatives have complained about moderation, the examples given were of prominent alt-right fascist adjacent figures being banned. Christian Nationalists and White Nationalists are fundamentally fascists, but some of them are defended in cultural wars by a good chunk of conservative voices. E.g. Alex Jones received conservative op-Ed’s in his support when he lost a lawsuit.
Wow, this Nazism stuff is super contagious! I shudder to think that most of the world has caught it by now.
The Nazis went from a fringe political movement to a solid minority voice (with 20% of the seats and about 33% of the vote). Then came the Reichstag Fire and heavy repression of opposition - getting them to 44% of votes in a “free” election. And then came the Enabling Act and there were no more votes.
What this saying means ultimately is that enabling fascism via silence makes people anti-democratic. It does not take many people passively sitting out of the way for authoritarian regimes to take power - and they are only removed by the bullet box not the ballot box.
I will note I can’t find the providence for this saying actually existing in post WW2 Germany and it is likely a modern invention. It is nonetheless a true sentiment of some of the soul searching German and other fascist ruled societies made after WW2.
Lets take Trump, since you asked for a specific example. Certainly this criteria applies to Trumpists be definition, libs of TT, etc:
[x] America first (nationalism)
[x] Attempts to discredit elections and strong arm state officials (centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader)
[x] Build the wall (severe economic and social regimentation, racist)
[x] Muslim ban (severe economic and social regimentation, racist)
[x] Undermining the free press (forcible suppression of opposition)
[x] January 6th (forcible suppression of opposition)
[x] Telling the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by...Somebody's got to do something about antifa and the left" (forcible suppression of opposition, racist)
Did Trump (or any US leadership past or present) wield that kind of violent and absolute power over government and people?
> severe economic and social regimentation
Again, I think of NK, China's treatment of Uighurs, their Covid lockdown policy, etc.
The left and right have different ideas on what is good for the nation and they have some commonalities too. I think this is healthy. What's not healthy is demonizing the other side because of different perspectives and beliefs.
Ironically, this demonizing of other groups is actually more akin to fascism (not calling anyone fascist, just pointing out the irony in this case) as that is the strategy used against the opposition by real fascists. E.g. Hitler towards Jews.
On Reddit, the language used against anyone not aligning with the Left is downright scary and dehumanizing. [1]
[0] Dictator: a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has obtained control by force.
[1] See r/politics
They specifically said in their communications that LibsOfTikTok hadn’t violated any rules directly. Why the suspensions then?
I think intelligent people are abnormally capable of self-deception.
If you find yourself on average on the opposite side of the vast majority of smart people the first thing that is in order is self refection. While being smart doesn't make them correct the last thing that would be useful would be to dismiss the majority of smart folks.
Smart people are better at contriving complex justifications that seem right but are in fact wrong.
People don’t usually set out with the intention of deceiving themselves.
And yes, I do have a problem with their tone. Conservatives are way overdrawn at the good faith store, having made a years-long habit of hyping things up. This example is from 2005: https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/Weekly_Standard_M...
Which is kinda proven given that I currently can't reply to you because HN is rate limiting me...
FYI: this comment took 3 hours to make
Not because we are all trying to push some left wing agenda.
I don't see any of that in the above comment. Did they edit it to make it less so?
This is a ridiculous strawman fallacy. HN loves gossip about tech companies getting caught doing things all of the other times it has happened. Hundreds of comments and upvotes on each one. But not this time? What's the difference?
These so called Twitter files have gotten over 2000 comments combined on HN. Not sure what your problem is.
As another sibling comment states, other platforms also do similar things. It's easy how such systems get started and evolve. In fact, given the severe downvoting I see on this and similarly polarizing threads on HN, I think if someone built a browser extension that hides comments by users from a user created list many people HN users would probably use it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-acces...
A more pressing question, IMO: one of the screenshots shows a “direct messages” button. Does Weiss and/or Taibbi have unrestricted access to read users DMs right now?
Now that would be interesting.
https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music-arts/justin-...
the head of twitter security testified to Congress how twitter had poor security controls and audibility across the company. If that button does allow ability to read DM, Twitter employees have surely abused that for ages without repercussions.
Let’s stay focused on the important details rather than worrying about established journalists exposing the power the former twitter employees wielded to sway public opinion
How many employees have access to the tool? Do all users see that button? Seems pretty likely they’d have tiered access levels, no? What if access to user DMs was a hugely restricted piece of functionality and Musk just said “screw it” and gave it to two non-employees on a whim?
You’re writing off a potentially huge breach in user trust, not to mention legal repercussions.
you are pushing fake news to distract from the core abuses, all to protect liberal interests
You’ve also not explained why an audience like HN is incapable of discussing multiple issues in a discussion forum. Do you really think everyone here is so dumb?
Let’s be real here: you don’t want any discussion that strays from the talking points dished out by Weiss because such discussion would show her talking points are largely nonsense. The Twitter Files is a house of cards but as long as the right people keep saying it isn’t the audience will keep huffing it like glue.
the new head of twitter trust & safety notes she provided screenshots of the internal service to the journalists
please continue trying to distract with the fake news; the liberal house of cards are falling down and I’ve got my popcorn out
One of the journalists in question. Also the wording in your tweets leaves some wriggle room:
> For security purposes, the screenshots requested [...]
Are we going to get some transparency from Twitter about exactly what tools/communications were accessible by the journalists in question? Otherwise this seems to be an exact repeat of what Twitter has already been doing for years, except now it's a private company and accountable to only one absurdly rich individual.
It's not happening.
It's happening, but it's equally applied.
It's not equally applied and that's a good thing.
We already knew about it. Why is this news?
Even if they did it's clear that whoever made the screenshot in the libsoftiktok screen doesn't even have access to see their email. Like all other tech admin panels, there are access controls. Just because the 'delete website' button is visible to you doesn't mean your account has permission to use it.
Just because the 'delete website' button is visible to you doesn't mean your account has permission to use it.
Well, nothing looks greyed out. Again, I'm going to assume they had access unless there's specific information to the contrary.
[0] https://twitter.com/ellagirwin/status/1601084794288640000
I feel that what we're seeing is largely investigation theater designed to validate a particular outcome rather than a real inquiry. If you consider this from an information/hybrid warfare point of view and think of Twitter as territory, then it's reminiscent of highly engineered plebiscites that precede or follow invasions to give them an aura of legitimacy.
These aren't far right or left, it's everyone. Likely all of us have been secretly moderated at some point without our knowledge.
When I discovered this happening on the platform I used, I built a tool to let me know when it happened, and I published that tool for others to use. Now it sees 500k users per month. Similar tools could be built for all other sites that do this.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916519
HN also gives you an option to see this content in your account settings (showdead = yes).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916414
"There's no evidence people and tweets are being suppressed"
<Shows Evidence with receipts>
"This is old news, nothing new here."
Is there a mailing list where these things are coordinated? I remember there was JournoList in the late 2000s, so is there a new one for internet commenters of a certain political persuasion? How do they get the talking points memo?
Wait, where is this one?
I'm sorry, but it doesn't take coordination to know that shadowbans exist. It's spoken openly on Twitter, there are tools to test accounts, etc. It's not surprising because it's open knowledge. No political persuasion necessary to be in the know here.
I'm sure this is true. But the claim is that there's some politically-inclined motivation to it all.
It's also fact there are brigades and bots operating on HN and NGAF.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I think you should refresh your time zones knowledge.
But yeah, Northamerican leftists are not awake yet.