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Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

patriotone.substack.com

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Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#121

Post by logicalmonster »

q1w2 wrote: post #86
matheusmoreira wrote: post #82

> "artificially" amplifying information Isn't that the whole point of Twitter?

I think what they meant was that they detected bot activity associated with the account.

There's multiple huge problems if Twitter takes this approach to rules enforcement even if they're genuinely trying to be honest and unbiased.

1) Every account on Twitter has "bot activity associated with this account": if for no other reason that random advertising bots retweet, follow, or like random people and posts to attempt to blend in as a genuine account and hide their true purpose. This reasoning gives Twitter essentially carte blanche to delete everybody, even assuming they were willing to be fully transparent about the evidence surrounding their bans (which they're not).

2) Bad Actors can easily sabotage accounts they dislike. Here's just 1 method how this can be done: there's 10,001 shady fly by night firms in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and other countries that offer services to "buy followers" or "buy retweets". It's trivial for somebody without programming skill and even a few hundred dollars to just buy mass spam and shill the hell out of an account (the lower quality the better) until somebody notices and that account gets banned.

You don't even have to assign bad motives to Twitter to see the obvious problems here.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#122

Post by pixelgeek »

the_gipsy wrote: post #95
mbesto wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No I think that 'corporate-speak' is the term for that. And it clearly doesn't get the point across since there are any number of people posting that this in an incorrect use of the word.

I think what is happening is that some people want to imply malice by misusing a word.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#123

Post by imwillofficial »

ineedasername wrote: post #92
danlugo92 wrote: post #66

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.

Slippery Slope isn’t a fallacy. It’s literally how things progress from good to worse. Identifying early signs of Stalin’s rise to power would be called Slippery Slope these days.

As for twitter, their focus removing on information that is damaging to people in power is concerning. These days private corps wield as much or more power than governments.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#124

Post by pixelgeek »

ineedasername wrote: post #70
balbaugh wrote: post #7

There is a Substack associated with the suspended twitter account [0]. They have made a recent post about the suspension of said account and all of the users other twitter accounts [1]. It states that twitter told the user "the account was “artificially” amplifying information". [0] https://patriotone.substack.com [1] https://patriotone.substack.com/p/twitter-suspension

So they were banned for using sock puppets to popularize their tweets?

Or for being a part of a network that was doing so. I suspect that it is more likely that they were just part of a system that was promoting tweets and reposting material

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#125

Post by adam_arthur »

raxxorrax wrote: post #88
adam_arthur wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty confident that if a suitable case made it to the supreme court, social media like Twitter would be deemed a de facto public square under the US Constitution. Hopefully then people would apply a little more critical thought, rather than just parroting private vs public. It's clear that at a certain scale, a private space becomes de facto public one, similar to anti-trust legislation breaking up perfectly va…

Apart from that you are also free to apply freedom of speech as a principle outside the bounds of the law, like many platforms have done most of the time until advertising got out of hand with privacy violations and content restrictions. Don't know how anyone could support more content restrictions... doesn't seem too bright at all, didn't hear any compelling case and you always have the option to not engage.

Yeah, there are also many workarounds aside from censoring. Such as allowing people to select filters/their own curation algorithm and so on.

But it seems to be the European model to censor societally undesirable viewpoints, from my understanding. So free speech from the American perspective does not seem to be a universally held belief.

Personally I think it's worth striving for, but providing tools for those who want to live in a bubble.

There will never be a "correct" single algorithm or filter that can be applied globally. These companies are doing a lot of unnecessary damage to themselves by trying to force it to be that way.

I believe all algorithms for curating what you see on the largest social media platforms should be required to be open source/explained, and that third parties should be able to write their own to be used on those platforms. Idea needs to be fleshed out more, but something along those lines. And all speech that's constitutional should be left untouched (in USA). If you don't like it, filter it out.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#126

Post by mikeyouse »

bko wrote: post #106

They also suspended Nancy Tracker [0], a twitter account tracking Nancy Pelosi's stock trades. Something else I noticed that I think has changed is the follower counts on suspended accounts, which is only available on the app. It may have always been hidden on the web. I get it, they're a private platform. But if they're acting on behalf of powerful state actors, how can we say that's not suppression on speech? The w…

It appears NancyTracker and the Maxwell court case from this thread were run by the same account?

https://gab.com/NancyTracker/posts/107411717342791428

If so - whatever got them suspended (bot farm upvotes usually?) got both accounts suspended. These then aren't separate suspensions but one person's suspension across multiple accounts.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#127

Post by pixelgeek »

bko wrote: post #106

They also suspended Nancy Tracker [0], a twitter account tracking Nancy Pelosi's stock trades. Something else I noticed that I think has changed is the follower counts on suspended accounts, which is only available on the app. It may have always been hidden on the web. I get it, they're a private platform. But if they're acting on behalf of powerful state actors, how can we say that's not suppression on speech? The w…

> But if they're acting on behalf of powerful state actors, how can we say that's not suppression on speech?

Well you would first have to prove that they were acting on the behalf of powerful state actors. Does anyone have that proof?

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#128

Post by FDSGSG »

imwillofficial wrote: post #117
FDSGSG wrote: post #68

The substack username "patriotone" is pretty revealing. Reeks of QAnon nonsense, the posts themselves contain some pretty obvious dog whistles too.

If it’s obvious, is it a dog whistle?

Yeah, why not. "States' rights" would be an easy example.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#129

Post by TechBro8615 »

Jimmc414 wrote: post #4

It is sad that actions like this don't even surprise people anymore. Perhaps this is one of those Twitter actions that falls under the umbrella of "improving community discussions" instead of the first amendment.

Twitter banned the US president and went out of their way to clarify they are not banning the Taliban.
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