Comment by Animats
5 years ago
Twitter policy:
"We start from a position of assuming that people do not intend to violate our Rules. Unless a violation is so egregious that we must immediately suspend an account, we first try to educate people about our Rules and give them a chance to correct their behavior. We show the violator the offending Tweet(s), explain which Rule was broken, and require them to remove the content before they can Tweet again. If someone repeatedly violates our Rules then our enforcement actions become stronger. This includes requiring violators to remove the Tweet(s) and taking additional actions like verifying account ownership and/or temporarily limiting their ability to Tweet for a set period of time. If someone continues to violate Rules beyond that point then their account may be permanently suspended."
Somewhere a counter was just incremented. It's going to be amusing if Twitter management simply lets the automated system do its thing. At some point, after warnings, the standard 48-hour suspension will trigger. Twitter management can simply simply say "it is our policy not to comment on enforcement actions".
They've suspended the accounts of prominent people many times before.[1]
I would imagine that accounts of "important" people are handled personally rather than by automated algorithm. As Jack Dorsey points out in this[0] Joe Rogan podcast, the reported tweets by public or algorithm are manually checked at some point.
Approx. 4000 employees of Twitter all around the world. Every day 100k (edit: 100M) tweets are sent. The reports of tweets that violate the platform policy are (reported by public) enter a queue. These are then inspected by personnel hired by Twitter (number varies proportionally to the scale reports in the queue).
The personnel then go through a series of steps to take an action such as making you verify again, delete those tweets, suspending the account, or in the last resort ban the user permanently.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ
> Every day 100k tweets are sent
When I worked there we handled about ~6k tweets/sec all day every day. (~500,000,000 tweets/day)
There are 145M daily active users on Tweeter. So that’s approx 3 tweets per user. Sounds reasonable.
What database did you use?
2 replies →
Only 100k/day? That sounds quite low.
Maybe 100k tweets by people who are checked manually? I'm sure there are millions of tweets send every day.
It is low. Estimates [0] put the number closer to 500M/day.
[0] https://www.internetlivestats.com/twitter-statistics/#source...
1 reply →
Twitter is mostly retweets, though.
1 reply →
Better leveraging Twitter's reporting feature is probably the most neutral way to solve this.
When a tweet is deemed response-worthy, they should post the report numbers. Value in numbers shields them in many ways and could legitimize their actions as a neutral party. Then, if they miss something, they can simply say there weren't enough reports. This will then empower the feature in the future.
I suggest this as active Reddit moderator with a community of 40,000+ subscribers who regularly has to enforce rules and uses auto-mod to help manage reports and shares that with the community.
-----------------------
You can report tweets for:
(1) Being not interested in it (you just get redirected to a mute or block button)
(2)It's suspicious or spam
---> The account is fake
---> Includes a link to a potentially harmful or phishing site
---> Hashtags are unrelated
---> Uses the reply function to spam
---> Something else
(3) It's abusive or harmful
---> It's disrespectful
---> Includes private information
---> Includes targeted harassment
---> It directs hate against a protected category (eg race, religions, gender, orientation, disability)
---> Threatening violence
---> They're encouraging self-harm or suicide
(4) It's misleading about politics or civic events
---> It has false information about how to vote
---> It intends to suppress or intimidate someone from voting
---> It misrepresents it's affiliation or impersonates an official
(5) It expresses intentions of self-harm or suicide.
-----------------------
It's pretty good but I would suggest the very simple following updates:
- Updating the main issue (It's abusive or harmful) to (It's abusive or encourages violence or destruction of property)
- Adding a sub-issue to (It's misleading about politics or civic events) with (A political official is supporting false or unsubstantiated information as definitive truth.)
- Adding a sub-issue to (It's suspicious, spam, or false) with (It's supporting false or unsubstantiated information as definitive truth.)
- Adding chevron icons (>) as a visual cue that each main reporting issue has many sub-issues
This doesn’t work for political tweets. Look at replies to even Trumps benign tweets and you will see 50% of the population would hate other guy no matter what they tweet. Every single tweet of Joe Biden and Trump will get flagged no matter what they were tweeting.
It depends on who and what. And it's the inconsistency that will fuel the critics.
They didn't suspend Spike Lee who caused direct harm to a private individual who happened to share a name with an infamous individual: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/spike-lee-settles-twi...
The article you linked to was over 8 years ago at this point - it was years closer to the founding of Twitter than it is to the present day. I don't think that can be considered relevant to their current enforcement regime.
Because suspending Spike Lee would have required someone at Twitter to make that decision, and they're not going to do that. But will leap at the chance for Trump. It's been a clear double standard for years.
Plenty of left-leaning people get banned as well.
11 replies →
If they were going to "leap at the chance" to suspend Trump, then why haven't they already? He's been treading in the grey area of their ToS for years.
1 reply →
Yes, double standard to protect Trump. Who has for years twitted violent stuff, racist stuff, and Twitter had let it slide. I don't get this weird victim mentality of Trump folks. Trump has been treated with kid gloves by Twitter. Meanwhile, the largest broadcast network is literally Trump's state media.
1 reply →
You’re wrong on every point.
> Somewhere a counter was just incremented. It's going to be amusing if Twitter management simply lets the automated system do its thing. At some point, after warnings, the standard 48-hour suspension will trigger. Twitter management can simply simply say "it is our policy not to comment on enforcement actions".
I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter has exempted Trump's accounts from all automated moderation. However, I'm half expecting them to ban him about twelve seconds after he leaves office.
I would never let a machine automate any decision regarding Trump's account, considering that any action would be scrutinized by the entire world and could have massive repercussions...
So definitely not "a counter incremented somewhere". This is a political decision.
Yes, a political decision to manually increment a counter.
> However, I'm half expecting them to ban him about twelve seconds after he leaves office.
At the top management level, they are probably weighing the possibility that he never leaves office (a plausible scenario at this point), and how that scenario affects their bottom line.
They probably don’t want US institutions to dissolve into full-blown autocracy... But on the other hand, if that were to happen, then it would be better for the stock price if they hadn’t burned all bridges with the new leader for life.
You can bet that Zuckerberg is making the same calculus - except that he seems to have chosen a side. Facebook is no longer pretending to care about preventing autocracy. They are betting on the GOP coup succeeding, and are building bridges accordingly.
Note: no amount of downvoting by the alt-right fringe lurking here will make the facts go away. Downvote away since you don’t have the courage to write down and justify your true beliefs. You are an embarrassment to the technology community. You are the spineless, petty, cowardly foundation upon which all autocracies are built.
You've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly lately. That's not cool. Emotions are inflamed right now, and that makes it more important, not less, to follow these rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1 reply →
"they are probably weighing the possibility that he never leaves office"
I think you are very far from reality
63 replies →
> At the top management level, they are probably weighing the possibility that he never leaves office
Statements like this won't get you taken seriously.
I'm not any of those things. I'm just down voting you on the basis you're complaining about down votes with personal attacks.
I agree that this system is more fragile than most people think; somehow almost preferring automatic government than the tediousness that functioning democracy requires. And sometimes people get a rude reminder of this.
I do not agree that the scenario you're talking about is probable (which is indicated by plausible). Perhaps you mean possible? Sure, but in that case it's also possible money instantly has no meaning, there is no Congress, there are no states, there are no judges or generals, there are no prison sentences, there are no laws at all whatsoever. Nothing matters, everything is possible.
That is a sense of unpredictability a society does not trend toward no matter how ill it is.
But try to understand that completely ending all constitutional order is not how revolutions tend to progress. Even in the U.S. civil war, there were two (federal) constitutions in place for two sets of states. There was order, even in that chaos.
I agree Trump has autocratic tendencies. But he is a weak minded fool. He will not make for a strong autocrat, he even contradicts himself and dithers too much for this. He is Side Show Bob. He's a distraction. To succeed he would need a very high percentage of authority, trust, and compliance - and there's just no way he's going to get that.
I question whether he even does something to sabotage the election. On January 20th his term of office expires. At noon he is not the POTUS if there's been no election. Further, there's no House of Representatives, because their term expires on January 3rd. And 1/3 of Senators are not Senators. But at 12:01pm on January 20th, there is a person who will become POTUS without an election. And that's the President pro tempore of the Senate. Following that, the states will surely already be figuring out how to reinstitute the House through either appointments or new elections. It's not up to the federal government. But to pass new laws, including a new election to make up for the delayed one, we'll need a Congress.
That has never happened. I can tell you many examples from history, things that are way more likely than any of this. Including from American history. Some of those things are violent, even in fact violent for just one person, that are way more likely than autocracy.
Trump's best chance is for the election to proceed.
So, while you can't for sure predict what's going to happen next, just try to have some imagination for rare events that have happened rather than events that have never happened. Trump is a chickenshit asshole but that's like, the least remarkable or interesting thing going on here, because he's been a chickenshit asshole his whole life - not news! And that doesn't really highly qualify (or disqualify) him as an autocrat. He's not going to be one because he's just too incompetent and steps on his own dick every chance he gets. Just try to calm down, let him have enough rope to hang himself, and he will.
7 replies →
> no amount of downvoting by the alt-right fringe lurking here will make the facts go away.
What facts? What alt-right fringe?
Trump was voted in by tens of millions of Americans and still has tens of millions of supporters.
> At the top management level, they are probably weighing the possibility that he never leaves office (a plausible scenario at this point)
Trump is in his 70s...
> since you don’t have the courage to write down and justify your true beliefs
What true beliefs are you hinting at here and why would they take courage to write down?
1 reply →
> about twelve seconds after he leaves office.
which will be in 18 years
He isn't competent enough to pull that off. He can't even get his own staff to do what he wants most of the time.
very naive to think that was a counter flagging POTUS tweet.
following the wikipedia article I found
https://www.avclub.com/twitter-releases-statement-confirming...
"Twitter releases statement confirming it'll never ban Donald Trump"
The headline is misleading. The "statement" is a Twitter thread, and it doesn't say anything about banning or not banning everybody. The body of the article concedes that it only "heavily implies" they'll never ban him. And that was three years ago. Some stuff has happened since then.
Even Jack Dorsey's account was suspended in 2016 mistakenly.
As was Donald Trump's in 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/02...
Maybe. But there's probably a business model out there this is simply a Twitter clone that waits for the Trump account to move there, and bang, instant success.
There is and they (Gab) get an okay number of likes on every one of his posts promoting it. [0] Also Facebook is now well positioned to be his next platform if he moves off twitter.
0. https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1266347307391488002
3 replies →
Or mastadon! Whitehouse could have its own server, and would not need to worry about sensorship
Gab has been the theoretical right-wing Twitter for years. It wallows in mediocrity.
Trump and his cult are on twitter to try to bask in the legitimacy. If they're on their own, the raw charade of how childish and imbecilic their noise is becomes too obvious.
It's also a bit hilarious given that Gab, created because of crybabies like Trump and Scott Adams, has hilariously restrictive policies, just as The_Donald is one of the most snowflake-moderated subs on Reddit. The right really can't stand each other.
Since Twitter and Trump seem intent on getting into a pissing match (Trump a bit more so), what's the worst each side could do?
Twitter could block him and Trump could continue to sell out America to foreign interests.
Useful to know that this specific selective application of editorial bias by Twitter, was after Trump's executive order [1] on preventing online censorship of free speech.
>"... Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias. As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet. .."
When a car manufacture represents their 18-wheeler fleet as a 'passenger cars' -- we understand that this is a lie and demand corrective action.
When twitter manufactures opinions and hides them as 'public forum discourse' -- we are supposed to be ok with that?
I would be ok if their manufactured opinions are displayed to paid subscribers only, who want to care what Jack Dorsey thinks about President Trump, obamagate or Brexit.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
How is this "political bias"?
Is everything that disagrees with Trump now "political bias"?
I'm not even from the US and I know what "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" means and what outcome it envisions.
> When twitter manufactures opinions and hides them as 'public forum discourse' -- we are supposed to be ok with that?
What are these opinions? Can you speak them out loud? Which opinions are being hidden? Can you write down the message of these opinions in plain words?
Could you write down these opinions as if they were your own, without violating HN's house rules?
The outcome was clear the moment a president mentioned the use of the national guard in dealing with demonstrations.
Using the military to quell civil unrest means people getting shot. Last time in 1992 on the order of George HW Bush, the resulted was 50 dead and 2000 injured.
Unless a person is talking about using the military to assist with natural disasters, the person is envisioning the violence of "when the looting starts, the shooting starts".
You cannot not have bias when you are talking politics. For Tweeter’s case, one would need to look at statistics for how many tweets from each sides are getting flagged. If one side is getting all the flake then it means that side is evil and other side is holy. In politics, this is not possible over long term if democracy is in full effect.
WRT "... Is everything that disagrees with Trump now "political bias"?.."
I think much of the media (bbc, reuters, vox, cnbc, msnbc, abc, cnn, buzzfeed, huffingtonpost, twitter's leadership) basically are the propaganda arm of the anti-Trump Coup.
The use a multi-level approach to execute and to protect it:
- to keep legitimacy of their disinformation efforts, keep 10-15% of the reporting as 'neutral', and then flood the 90% of the time with anti-president message.
This tactic allows for what I call: Plausible Deniability.
When you confront these propagandists about the majority of their disinformation compaign, they point to the '10%' and then claim plausible deniability ('eg we do not do everything wrong)
- Use War propaganda tactics [2]. With emphasis on 4 (We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!) and 5 (The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention)
- instigate unrest (and there are a number of tactics to do this, as we are seeing being unrolled)
When you use the above decomposition, it is, at least for me, easy to see what is going on and why.
With regards to:
>".. Could you write down these opinions as if they were your own, without violating HN's house rules?.."
Sure. So let me re-iterate the context
Trump's tweet: >"... ....These THUGS are dishonering the memory of George Floyd, and I won't let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any Difficult and we will assume control, but when looting starts, the the shooting starts.
Thank you. ..."
The twitter suggests that the above is glorifying violence.
I think that an opinion, it is a wrong opinion. And leads to more violence.
I would interpret Trump's message as:
- Laws will be enforced. Help to local police is on the way (in the form of National Guard that Tim Woltz mobilized [1]).
- Physical harm to Innocent people and their property will lead to shootings.
I would interpret Twitter's handling of this as: we do not want law enforcement to enforce laws. Loot all you want, it is your right under the circumstances.
[1] https://www.newsmax.com/politics/tim-walz-george-floyd-riots...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basic_Principles_of_War_Pr...
1 reply →