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“Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

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Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#41

Post by laughinghan »

vqdwj wrote: post #3

>The experience of having made a viral tweet is The Worst Fucking Thing. If you make a "viral tweet", don't read the replies. You have the tools to do so, since Twitter allows you to mute a thread.

Most people use social media not with the intention of shouting into the void, but with the intention of getting replies that they want to read, that they then do read, and perhaps reply in turn.

If that's what usually happens, but sometimes randomly they get tons and tons of replies that they don't want (as claimed by this post), that's an interesting and noteworthy flaw that I've never seen specifically discussed.

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#43

Post by ankushnarula »

wmil wrote: post #17
lilbobbytables wrote: post #6

"Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself" What am I missing here? There was no harassment of any sort. Alternative headlines could have been: "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you gain more followers" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you drive awareness" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you get more twitter followers for your cause or business" "Twitter has an algorithm that expands…

I guess the point is that Twitter could easily tone down pile ons by noticing that a tweet is generating many more replies than likes. Then reduce display of that tweet instead of boosting it to non-followers. Perhaps not for blue checkmarks (they've declared themselves central to the public debate), but for average users Twitter should try to calm down pile ons.

Most of those problems would go away if they a) eliminated the gamification (displaying numbers of replies, retweets, and likes) and b) required textual comments of a particular length.

But then so would the engagement and ad revenue.

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#44

Post by ankushnarula »

Why would an amoral view of user engagement be a surprise for a company's whose goal is to show as many ads as possible?

And on top of all that, Twitter's own editorial team regularly stokes political/cultural controversy by boosting non-issues in Twitter Moments and Trending topics.

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#45

Post by tunesmith »

freehunter wrote: post #7

My business does a lot of posting on Facebook of sometimes controversial things (we're a news site and we sometimes cover local politics). By far the most engaged stuff is the most controversial where people begin to fight and attack each other. I have ~3k followers on one of my pages. Usually ~200-300 people see any given post if it has no engagements. If it has normal engagement, it might get to 1000-2000 views, st…

This is kind of like how the value of information is how surprising it is. Classic information theory, but with a twist, because in these cases the "surprise" element is often not the value of the information itself, but the way it is presented. So these algorithms are quite good at recognizing when things are surprising and thus perhaps deserving of wider sharing, but bad at recognizing what kind of surprise it is - is it actually new information, or is it just froth?

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#46

Post by benj111 »

otakucode wrote: post #35
freehunter wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of locating in Silicon Valley and hiring the smartest programmers in the world if you can't figure out an algorithm to make hateful posts not show up as often in someone's feed? I doubt it's because they can't. The more likely answer is they don't want to.

I would imagine the issue is certainly because they can't. What is hateful to you is charming and encouraging to someone else. Social norms and cultural differences are gigantic. Look at the recent controversy with the conservative guy on YouTube who referred to a reported from Vox as their 'queer Latino reporter' and it was seen as hate speech... despite the Vox reporter openly and frequently labelling themselves as…

"How is it supposed to know that when person A says something and when person B says the exact same words....."

I was about to argue against this but then realised its worse than you suggest.

If I as a white person used the N word to describe a black person I would be labelled a racist, whereas a black person can say it all day long. But even if I black up and say it, its even worse. But then with gender the rules are almost reversed, I can declare myself a woman and expect that to be somewhat respected.

And on the internet no one knows you're a dog, or a transvestite in black face.

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#47

Post by benj111 »

freehunter wrote: post #37
otakucode wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine the issue is certainly because they can't. What is hateful to you is charming and encouraging to someone else. Social norms and cultural differences are gigantic. Look at the recent controversy with the conservative guy on YouTube who referred to a reported from Vox as their 'queer Latino reporter' and it was seen as hate speech... despite the Vox reporter openly and frequently labelling themselves as…

We're not talking about banning these posts, or hiding them, or censoring them. Just not showing them as widely as they do other posts. It doesn't even need to go as deep as "this is hateful", but rather "this has the potential to be hateful" or giving the author the ability to control how widely the message is being shared. I see these people here trying to debate solutions like good engineers, but unless they work…

What's the line between censoring and "not showing them as widely as other posts"?

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#48

Post by spectre256 »

lilbobbytables wrote: post #6

"Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself" What am I missing here? There was no harassment of any sort. Alternative headlines could have been: "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you gain more followers" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you drive awareness" "Twitter has an algorithm that helps you get more twitter followers for your cause or business" "Twitter has an algorithm that expands…

The missing piece which the Twitter thread author only touched on is that how a tweet is received by a reader depends a lot on whether or not they come from similar communities and have similar context to the author. By surfacing tweets to people that the author doesn't know at all, it's likely the responses will be more negative in general.

Anyone with a large twitter following knows roughly what the makeup of their follower base is, and they compose tweets accordingly. While always necessary to some extent, it's usually hard to contextualize every single tweet as if it could be read by anyone, so it often isn't done.

As a silly contrived example, lets say I am a software developer that focuses on operating system performance and I tweet something like "I'm working on an algorithm to make killing children an order of magnitude more efficient". (note to real twitter users: never tweet that)

My followers know I'm talking about killing child _processes_ on a computer. So they reply things like "oh, that would be great, it would make this one shell script I have a lot faster to execute" or maybe even "personally I'd rather you encouraged users to use threads rather than forking lots of processes". There might be a heated discussion, but it will be with a HUGE shared context of information.

Now the Twitter algorithm picks it up, and the tweet gets seen by lots of people who don't know anything at all about operating systems. They are, understandably, completely appalled. They start responding with anger. Threats, abuse, etc.

So, Twitter changing the dynamic from "your tweets will primarily be seen by your followers" to "your tweets will frequently be seen by your followers followers" can actually have a big impact on the platform. It will at minimum take some adjustment. Operating with the assumption of one dynamic when there is in fact the other will be...painful.

Re: “Twitter has an algorithm that creates harassment all by itself”

#50

Post by rndgermandude »

freehunter wrote: post #30
izzydata wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound like a solid indicator of an issue. Two friends could be having a back and forth discussion with no harassment or conflict. You'd end up with 25+ replies and 1 like.

What's the point of locating in Silicon Valley and hiring the smartest programmers in the world if you can't figure out an algorithm to make hateful posts not show up as often in someone's feed? I doubt it's because they can't. The more likely answer is they don't want to.

We're at a stage in "AI" where we can fool image detection with modifying a single pixel, where Google AI mislables black teenagers as gorillas and bing overlooks child porn, and where self driving cars still self drive into things.

All while "learn to code" is used to harass in some contexts...

But we expect twitter folks to just figure out an algorithm to filter out "hateful" posts, when there isn't even an accepted definition of hateful? The first replies it would filter is all the people telling Trump how bad and evil he and his policies are, while the people who try to actually harass people will find quick and easy ways to game the system, as they always have; that's my prediction of a 'best' case outcome.

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