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Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

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Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By handwaving this away I take it you're ok with Twitter deciding who is "reputable" and a "journalist"? There's no evidence this account violated the Twitter TOS.

Bruh I'm just happy someone linked someone else at all. These are current events, moving targets... Squabbling in the comments like that is more of a destructive distraction than anything

Is it not demonstrative of my point that this person immediately hand waves away twitter banning this account then immediately suggests that you use two blue checkmarks instead?

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#92

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ ...

Eh, that's a bit overused and tends to fall into the "slipper slope" fallacy territory a lot of the time it's rolled out. I'm withholding judgement on this one as there seems to be some indication the account was using using sock puppets to make them more popular. If that's true (and it might not be) that would lower the temperature on this ban to a standard TOS violation of a well-known policy.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#93

There are plenty of reputable journalists closely following the trial including Julie K Brown, the Miami based reporter whose story broke the whole thing open a few years ago leading to these arrests: https://twitter.com/jkbjournalist Adam Klasfeld is another one I enjoy: https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports

By handwaving this away I take it you're ok with Twitter deciding who is "reputable" and a "journalist"? There's no evidence this account violated the Twitter TOS.

Twiter does this from a long time. Just normal propaganda machine in action.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#94
Twitter has a huge problem with bots.

On one hand, there are a lot of bots which are more or less malicious, e.g. trying to cause political strife or promote scams. On the other hand, Twitter sells advertisers on the idea that they have however many millions of users. So if Twitter was to actually get rid of the bots, then they would cause advertising revenue to drop, which might actually kill the company. So they are stuck with algorithmic techniques which walk a fine line of accuracy.

The solution is probably to mass verify real users (though "real name" verification is problematic). Right now, they use verification as a way to play favorites. Real users with hundreds of thousands of followers can't get verified.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#95
post #83
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information". Where does it say the information was false in that sentence? The newspeak worked. and to go from "artificially" to bots and fake accounts... OK, maybe. But how do you know? Not because they told you in that sentence, that's for sure.

> newspeak You guys keep using that word, but I don't think you know what it means. Twitter is a private company. Newspeak was a language developed by the government in Orwell's 1984. VERY different contexts here. For the record - what Twitter communicated is not clear and potentially deceptive, but this response wasn't written by some Twitter PR person. Some support person pressed a button and a canned twitter respo…

“Newspeak” is quite commonly used to describe corporate-speak. It gets the point across fairly well.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#96
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair but it’s an appeal to authority and skirts true Scotsman but… never the less on occasion reputable journalists are leveraged to plant narratives on behalf of interested parties because they are reputable, so there is that. It’s not as though very wealthy people were not ensnared by mr Epstein and would love to keep their involvement low key.

I mean, Julie K. Brown wrote like 30? articles about it, talked to 60+ victims, her reporting lead to Epstein's arrest, Acosta's resignation, Maxwell's trial -- I don't think she's "on the take". https://www.miamiherald.com/topics/jeffrey-epstein Is it an appeal to authority to trust a primary source who is literally in the courtroom every day, instead of a random anonymous Twitter account just cribbing from primary…

I grant you she’s doing a good job, but that does not grant her a monopoly on fact. If only accredited journalists are allowed to report then we have no Wikileaks, no citizen journalism etc. Twitter is in the wrong to suppress an account on account of “artificially” inflating engagement. First, they don’t have to present evidence and second What news organ doesn’t create artificial engagement? It’s a preposterous excuse.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#97
post #20

As a society we need to redefine what a public space is.

That's one of the reasons that we need a blockchain-based microblog platform to take off and become popular.

That actually sounds like a cool idea.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#98
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. It means that the account was using fake accounts and/or bots to help spread information that was viewed to be false.

> user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information". Where does it say the information was false in that sentence? The newspeak worked. and to go from "artificially" to bots and fake accounts... OK, maybe. But how do you know? Not because they told you in that sentence, that's for sure.

"artificial amplification" is Twitter's description of a category of behavior that Twitter defines in detail here:

https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/platform-mani...

There is nothing ambiguous or euphemistic about the phrase. It is very meaningful.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#99
post #83
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information". Where does it say the information was false in that sentence? The newspeak worked. and to go from "artificially" to bots and fake accounts... OK, maybe. But how do you know? Not because they told you in that sentence, that's for sure.

> newspeak You guys keep using that word, but I don't think you know what it means. Twitter is a private company. Newspeak was a language developed by the government in Orwell's 1984. VERY different contexts here. For the record - what Twitter communicated is not clear and potentially deceptive, but this response wasn't written by some Twitter PR person. Some support person pressed a button and a canned twitter respo…

Wrong word! Case dismissed, then?

Try to work out the meaning that is clearly in front of you, see if there's anything there, instead of using the dictionary as an artificial body part

Also: You happen to be absolutely wrong. "Newspeak" does a very good job here. Twitter is using dodgy language not in use before to prevent the wrongthink of people questioning their censoring. And it worked quite well!

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#100
post #12

> user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information". That is newspeak pure and simple.

(diclaimer: i actually agree on your position but.)

Newspeak is about destroying words to reduce the thought quality. The theory being somthing like: less precise words mean less precise thoughts.

This is the opposite of newspeak, this is creating new words association for new concepts (artificially amplifying information here meaning buying bot comments, retweets and likes). You can agree or disagree, you can find that this formulation lead to misinterpretation (i do), but this is not newspeak.

It's like Jordan Petterson reading of 1984. This really, really angers me. Even with people i kind of agree with. Maybe people should buy a text explanation of Orwell, as this is far from the easiest anticipation book to understand (the US government pushing of this book proves that really well) or read his experiences and how they translate in his books. And maybe tehy should re-read the books too. Winston's job was to remove words from the dictionary, not add new one.

I'm sorry, this is not personnal, but this is the 4rth time THIS WEEK that i hear someone talk to me about newspeak and being dead wrong about it. One of them critizing adding (ADDING ffs!) a new word in a dictionary. This had to come out.

Agree with your sentiment I guess. Don't use the term newspeak though, this is imho disqualifying.

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