Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#121

Post by 0xcde4c3db » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

tdxgx wrote: post #16

nailer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting banned for calling someone (a high rank politician!!!) a whore Also calling them a 'cunt'. Attitudes like the above are why ordinary men and women don't want to become politicians - it's assumed to be OK to insult them in any way. Why not just call Palin a hypocrite? You should be able to criticise politicians. However if you want better politicians, screaming that they're cunts and whores instead of commun…

If someone cant handle a verbal insult over the internet, I don't think they are fit for office

I see this attitude a lot in discussions about online harassment. Somehow we're supposed to believe that offensive behavior is a faceless, unaccountable force of nature, but the reactions of its targets are a matter of personal responsibility and character. I don't see how that adds up.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#122

Post by apo » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

> In recent years I’ve been using an open source, federated alternative to Twitter that uses a protocol called ActivityPub. I run my own server for myself and my friends. People on my server can communicate with other servers that support ActivityPub, similar to e-mail. If people on my server don’t like the way I manage it, they can always export their content and start their own, or transfer to someone else’s server.

Twitter is a for-profit company offering a product (its customers) to advertisers. As such, they get to delete any content whatsoever, regardless of the reason. They happen to be using a policy that will cause some accounts to be locked. This is going to get a lot worse because advertisers loath anything that doesn't conform.

Twitter and Facebook aren't the problem - they're symptoms of the terrible, low-hanging monetization fruit on today's web.

There are solutions. One is to stop criticizing Twitter for being beholden to its advertisers and instead build/participate in censorship-resistant platforms.

That's going to result in loss of reach, at least for a time. Then again, so does getting blocked.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#123

Post by maeln » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:19 PM UTC

My account has been locked because I ... used Twitter. I was rarely Tweeting, almost only RT/liking other Tweet. But one day, I started to have a discussion with another user regarding a subject that I was a bit knowledgeable about, and after something like 10 tweets in maybe 20+ minutes my account just got locked for "suspicious activity".

Twitter was asking for a phone number to unlock the account. And since I never gave them my phone number, any number could have work. Which mean that if somebody really hijacked my account to spam, they could have just definitely take it for themselves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . I saw this as what it was: just a attempt at taking even more personal data from me.

I never unlocked the account and I don't use Twitter anymore. And honestly, it has been great. Twitter is just full of people talking about thinks they don't have any knowledge about, overly emotional reaction and everybody trying to be more extreme than the other. Even when being very careful about who you follow, you are not protected since Twitter started to display Tweet from the people followed by the people you followed randomly.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#124

Post by TheOperator » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:19 PM UTC

perspective1 wrote: post #104

Their notification was fine. The tweet was vile and full of expletives. You'll have trouble finding any business or institution that tolerates speech like that. This isn't the censorship hill anyone should want to die on.

I don't agree. Wartime cartoons are vile yet we rarely censor them because of the historical value.

I do think that going back a decade with an algorithm and getting people to clean up tweets that likely match a regex filter is whitewashing and it does make twitter a less valuable historical resource. It's a totally different argument from the normal you should be able to say what you want - because I would support censorship of such tweets in the present.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#125

Post by mosselman » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

benwad wrote: post #72

mosselman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that this was 9 years ago. The landscape of what was acceptable back then is completely different from what it is now. Going back in time and banning people for this sort of thing is essentially the same as banning movies from the 60's because they don't show enough women driving cars or men helping out in the kitchen.

I don't think that tweet was ever acceptable - calling someone a "cunt", "whore", "idiot" and telling her to "go fuck yourself" all in 140 characters is really going out of your way to be unpleasant.

I agree, was referring to the following more than the original tweet:

> Is there a list of gender-neutral insults that we can refer to for compliance reasons?

The thing is that even if there is a list like this now, in 9 years saying 'woman' might not even be acceptable because it has 'man' in it. If 'woman' isn't something we say in 9 years, I don't think twitter, in 9 years, should start banning everyone who every tweeted it now.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#126

Post by danso » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:23 PM UTC

Putting aside the surrounding argument of whether Twitter is right to have this content policy, and accepting for the sake of argument that this is the kind of tweet that Twitter’s policy does censor (if haphazardly applied), I guess I don’t see the age of the tweet being necessarily relevant. All twitter content has long-tail reach, if Twitter has decided that they don’t want their service to ever have that content, then grandfathering old content doesn’t make much sense.

The question of whether the content flagging was automatic is an interesting one. In other instances, such as James Woods (who is still in Twitter purgatory) [0], the message he received doesn't have any language that indicates that it was manually reported and flagged, which it most certainly was.

Given how slow Twitter has been to roll out features in general, and Jack Dorsey's continued insistence on avoiding heavy handed moderation and policies, I have to doubt that Twitter rolled out an automated content system with such high potential of being an embarrassment. I don't know the author, but just because he isn't a frequent/recent Twitter user doesn't mean that an angry Internet mob from some other community hasn't decided to target his Internet accounts in general.

[0] https://twitter.com/Millerita/status/1119655394899415040?ref...

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#127

Post by Kuraj » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:24 PM UTC

rileyriley wrote: post #119

Is the point of this article supposed to be "Humans grow, so leave the vile stuff I said when I hadn't grown as much around for more and more people can see that I said it?" IMHO the fact that the biggest font in this article is used to reprint the reprehensible statement is a clue that this author is actually resisting growth by implying what he said isn't actually that bad, and twitter should keep showing it to mor…

Deleting the tweet would be like pretending they never said that in the first place, which is arguably worse.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#128

Post by tortasaur » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

apo wrote: post #122

> In recent years I’ve been using an open source, federated alternative to Twitter that uses a protocol called ActivityPub. I run my own server for myself and my friends. People on my server can communicate with other servers that support ActivityPub, similar to e-mail. If people on my server don’t like the way I manage it, they can always export their content and start their own, or transfer to someone else’s server…

Can't you both criticize Twitter and use open platforms? They aren't mutually exclusive.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#129

Post by danso » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:28 PM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #21

Honest question: is the source of the problem the hateful intent of the message, or the use of "bad words"? My reading on culture these days is that one can usually get away with spouting horrendous, hateful ideas so long as they do so without using a short list of offensive words. If the truly are trying to scrub hate from their platform, I applaud their effort, but they'll never succeed. Hate is too hard to define…

Twitter uses third-party contractors for human moderation. If the tweet was reported/flagged and made its way into manual review for a human, whoever looked at it probably didn't take more than 30 seconds to decide. Even if Twitter's moderator workforce is U.S. based (and thus, attune to cultural norms), they probably are optimized to issue suspensions for low-hanging fruit. Vulgarity is going to be more of an obvious signal to the average person, than obfuscated hateful messages.

Re: Twitter locked my account for a nine year old tweet

#130

Post by mschuster91 » Fri, Aug 16, 2019, 1:29 PM UTC

romaaeterna wrote: post #15

Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you can't just "start a competitor" to Twitter and have the market fix the problem (see gab.ai). If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need…

> If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.

At least in Germany, people can sue Twitter and Facebook to have their accounts re-opened. Of course, this option reduces the value of due process rights as one has to be able to fund a lawyer and the court fees...