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Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

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Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#151

Post by allenu »

blhack wrote: post #61

Twitter keeps running themselves into a trap, and it is unbelievable to me that they don't see it: they cannot be the arbiters of truth. It will not work, because inevitably they'll miss something, and then people will assume that that missed thing is true. The solution is NOT to do censorship based on truth. The entire system needs to be unreliable, because it is unreliable. People need to read things on twitter (an…

The principle of using skepticism is a sound one, but what do you do when the majority of your users don't employ that practice? Just let misinformation spread and just be okay with the ramifications on society because "it's not my problem my users are gullible"?

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#153

Post by ogre_codes »

JPKab wrote: post #99
ogre_codes wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What evidence do you have that the predominant source of trending information is motivated state-level actors? I didn't make that post. But the fact that state level actors have manipulated Twitter topics with bots, astroturfing, and other artificial means is pretty well established. I'm not sure I'd agree it's the "Predominant" source of trending information, that there has been state-level influence from foreign…

I didn't argue that. I was arguing with the "predominant" part he stated. I'm not a blind moron. I'm fully aware of bot manipulation. Who isn't? Yet I was downvoted for simply trying to reign in the completely overblown nature of these statements. These assertions since 2016 have been repeatedly made with partial and/or zero evidence. There is still zero evidence that the manipulation of social media by Russian asset…

> I was arguing with the "predominant" part he stated. I'm fully aware of bot manipulation. Who isn't?

You could have easily pointed this out above without being so argumentative. If you are so concerned about downvotes, perhaps you should avoid being so confrontational.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#154

Post by xboxnolifes »

crazygringo wrote: post #135
bobthepanda wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One possible option that never gets discussed is to nuke the amplification methods. If we stop recommending content automatically this ceases to be a problem.

They are nuking them right now (temporarily). It's not just being discussed, it's being done . But most of the time people like getting content recommended. It's what consumers want.

> It's what consumers want.

Do consumers want it, or is it merely taking advantage of some more subconscious human behavior patterns. And if the latter, is this something that is bad for humankind?

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#155

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

crazygringo wrote: post #133
notatoad wrote: post #8

>Second, we will prevent “liked by” and “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline and won’t send notifications for these Tweets. These recommendations can be a helpful way for people to see relevant conversations from outside of their network, but we are removing them because we don’t believe the “Like” button provides sufficient, thoughtful consideration prior to amp…

Squaring it is pretty easy, I think. Recommendation engines are neither inherently good or harmful -- think of them as an amplifier. In normal times, they work pretty well -- it gives you more of the stuff you like, which usually isn't harmful. Just entertaining/fluff/interesting/whatever. But closer to an election, they can be gamed and weaponized for harm -- Russia can activate botnets, fake accounts, etc. and lies…

> When it's not being weaponized so much, they can keep it on.

Clearly you understand the recommendation engine is being weaponised at all times.

So why are you also trying to defend it?

As others have pointed out, Twitters motivation is entirely composed of two motivating factors: financial and cover-your-arse.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#156

Post by CaptArmchair »

joshfraser wrote: post #30
iamdbtoo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is a community and all communities require some level of moderation. There's never a situation where you let people say whatever they want, whenever they want without any moderation at all and everything goes well. You have to set some of sort of standard. We already do this as a society, so why shouldn't that extend to Twitter?

How do you do that effectively on a platform with hundreds of millions of people with wildly differing world views?

Well, you start by acknowledging that by hosting hundreds of millions of people to your platform, you're also hosting the real world problems that come with them. And how you handle that a scale while mitigating the consequences turns into a nightmare.

Rather then evolving along with the needs of their users, Twitter froze it's functionality years ago. Twitter could have added a range of moderation tools, allow users to opt-out from re-tweets, trends and such, allowed people to create groups and communities, foster active cooperation with key users and it's communities,...

Why didn't that happen? Because those hundreds of millions of users aren't paying customers. Investing in all of those things simply isn't worth the investment or pressing enough in terms of optimizing for revenue through advertising and business intelligence.

An audience is a valuable commodity, and so what Twitter doesn't want is risk losing that commodity. Tweaking the functionality of the platform is such a risk.

However, hosting hundreds of millions of people who aren't customers, is also a huge liability. Worst case is having governments representing those poeple imposing hard regulatory frameworks that hurt revenue and profitability.

In a way, it's akin to the lions of the circus. People pay good money to see the lions perfom, but the circus has to accept the risks that come with keeping lions. Which includes getting shut down because the lions escaped and went to town.

So, why does Twitter cater to hundreds of millions of people, and why does the circus keep lions? Because the profits they gain from doing so outmatch the risks they have to accept.

Getting back to your original question, Twitter is basically Humanity's stream of consciousness materialized. It's prohibitively expensive, and rather utopian, to be able to moderate that in a meaningful way which caters to everyone's contentment. By contrast, Twitter's aspiration isn't to provide the best moderation, it's to implement just the bare minimum in order to not lose it's value.

Looking back at the blogpost, you'll find that most of what they propose is tweaks to how they filter content and a small tweak to how you do re-tweeting based on existing functionality. No fundamental changes to the feature set are put into place. On the scale of Twitter's operation, that's mainly targetting low hanging fruit since introducing more substantial changes would be a huge gamble that might end up hurting the business.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#157

Post by animationwill »

gotodengo wrote: post #63
notatoad wrote: post #8

>Second, we will prevent “liked by” and “followed by” recommendations from people you don’t follow from showing up in your timeline and won’t send notifications for these Tweets. These recommendations can be a helpful way for people to see relevant conversations from outside of their network, but we are removing them because we don’t believe the “Like” button provides sufficient, thoughtful consideration prior to amp…

>"we're gonna turn it back on in four weeks" This is my recurring issue when I see most "changes we're making for the election" posts. Sure this seems like a good step for this election. Fake news and the destabilization it can bring isn't just an American phenomenon though. Are they going to apply these precautions to elections in Brazil, or Myanmar?

>> "we're gonna turn it back on in four weeks"

We'll improve our site for 28 days, but the other 47 months of the year we will, uh...

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#158

Post by _qulr »

tpmx wrote: post #113
_qulr wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social network moderators are almost always low-paid, low-power, low-profile employees. It's not a great job. It's a high-volume job, like an assembly line. The highly compensated Twitter and Facebook software engineers are not doing the content moderation. They don't have the time, and they would run away screaming if they had to do it for an hour. It's likely that a lot of this work is even outsourced.

I assume they have created an hierarchy with a number of different roles. That's generally how you scale people-intensive tasks. I have no idea why you would want to classify all of those roles as "assembly line".

Let me ask this: what evidence is there that the results of Twitter's censorship are actually in line with the political beliefs of Twitter's employees?

In many cases, Twitter's rules have been used to suspend accounts that people thought they were supposed to protect. And Twitter has gone out of its way and contorted every rule in order to protect the President from censorship and suspension, out of "public interest", despite the fact that he has repeatedly violated the rules that would have caused anyone else to be suspended.

Re: Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election

#159

Post by jonmartinwest »

runarberg wrote: post #88
haunter wrote: post #34

Maybe sites like Twitter, Facebook etc should be US only. I mean only US users allowed to use it. If they do this with the US election then which will be the next? UK? Australia? And why not really? People would even cheer for it

I think the situation in the USA is quite unique. UK and Australia is not (as of yet) in any serious risk of their democracy being undermined in the next election. Sure you can say they could have had similar measures before the Kyrgyzstan or the Belarus elections. But there bad actors were perfectly able to undermine the democracy without the aid of social media.

It might because USA doesn't have something similar to 77th Brigade.
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