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Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

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Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#241

Post by logicalmonster »

dmpk2k wrote: post #231
joshuamorton wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to be assuming that the entire team of people at twitter who work on these problems either haven't considered or aren't able to address these issues. While there often are challenges with moderation and rules enforcement, this kind of stuff is pretty easy to address.

Given that I have wrestled with 2) in a different context, I'm quite interested in hearing the various (hopefully realistic) methods to address it. Actually serious.

I would like to know too.

But if you look at that profile, he says he works at Google. Think about that for a second. He claims this is an easy problem. But consider Google's approach to spam detection algorithms and see how there are so many false positives and innocent people getting screwed out of their ad accounts and livelihood. If this kind of stuff was easy, why hasn't anybody informed Google about it?

I'm not trying to pick on anybody here, but I believe there's a level of arrogance in thinking that this form of sabotage is somehow a solvable problem unless you somehow have access to all communications on the planet.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#242

Post by sieabahlpark »

pixelgeek wrote: post #159
imwillofficial wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that there is any in Stalin's rise to power[0] that would fit the definition. The post you are responding to also refers specifically to the Slippery Slope Fallacy[1] which is a different beast than just calling something a 'Slippery Slope' [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Consolidation_of... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

[dead]

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#243

Post by mdoms »

mountainb wrote: post #193
errcorrectcode wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends if Twitter's censors agree with the views expressed or not.

There should be a federal law that requires that these moderation teams keep extensive records of their censorship work product in order to maintain their immunity. This censorship work product would then be have to be made available in discovery. Lawsuits challenging a censorship action or account suspension relating to censorship should be granted an exception to the otherwise binding arbitration agreement. The pur…

What you're describing would be a ridiculously massive government overreach into a private company. I'm not American and I'm not some loony libertarian but you have to understand that private companies are and should be free to decide who they allow to use their service and under what conditions (within the bounds of anti discrimination laws).

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#244

Post by dundarious »

arpstick wrote: post #228
dundarious wrote: post #216

I’m sure there’s plenty of hyperbole in this post, and it's really just more hearsay, but within their lane, I think TrueAnon is reputable enough. https://twitter.com/trueanonpod/status/1468617453718675461 > It was some doofus not at the trials trying to shill his paid sub stack and then tweeting absolute bullshit. As you can imagine, a lot of the 500,000 followers were bots, which is probably why it got suspended. A…

very convenient that a lot of bot accounts suddenly follows an account for people trying to amplify the accessibility of information of a trial that is suspiciously low profile considering the people involved.

You can pay money for followers. You don't need the means of a nation state or shadowy cabal. I'm right there with you on the Maxwell/Epstein story being far more significant though.

But an analogy is, if you have a legitimate criticism of the security state/"deep state" (a phrase I use and have no aversion to), it's not useful to buy into Qanon nonsense just because they criticize some of the same people. I know nothing directly about "patriot one" so I'm not saying it's Qanon level nonsense, but I'll defer to TrueAnon that it was probably counter-productive as a source. And making that judgment doesn't put anyone in league with the devil.

Just follow better informed and more scrupulous sources. TrueAnon are flippant and mischievous in ways that diminish them slightly, but on the whole, they're excellent. And they're at the trial every day.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#245

Post by mindslight »

pixelgeek wrote: post #166
the_gipsy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you agree that there is a different nuance when using “newspeak”.

No. I think people are deliberately misusing a word to imply totalitarian control.

Companies use twisted non-straightforward language because they have the power to not suffer significant repercussions from doing so, just like a bona fide government. Some customers may see through the bullshit and leave, but on the whole most won't. Impotent totalitarianism is still totalitarianism.

Furthermore, newspeak in 1984 wasn't simply the language the government used to make pronouncements, but rather the language that people were expected to use to communicate (moreso for politically connected people IIRC). I'd say corporate speech with its baked in responsibility-dodging passive-aggression definitively qualifies, as the people making these statements seemingly believe they're communicating in earnest. It's only when they're taken out of the corporate context that their vacuousness becomes apparent.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#246

Post by samhw »

rhino369 wrote: post #177
TechBro8615 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, its not like the Taliban ever supported an insurrection.

It's ridiculous that this utterly obvious joke is being downvoted. I'm amazed -- and I say this kindly, as someone with Asperger's -- at the aggregate autism level on this site.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#247

Post by josefx »

ttybird wrote: post #232
joshuamorton wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under what claim would you file a lawsuit against a private company about censorship? Or are you asking for the first amendment to be repealed?

I thought that the first amendment was about people rather than companies. In addition to that there are many products where companies have to display certain information, such as age rating for games, health warrnings on cigaretts, food content, allergy warning, nutrition labels, medicine side-effects, etc It is hard to classify censorship as speech for a site that it is all about user-content.

> I thought that the first amendment was about people rather than companies.

Any amendment written before slavery was abolished probably had a rather flexible view on the whole "people" issue. If an African American can be property then a corporation can be a person.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#248

Post by joshuamorton »

logicalmonster wrote: post #241
dmpk2k wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that I have wrestled with 2) in a different context, I'm quite interested in hearing the various (hopefully realistic) methods to address it. Actually serious.

I would like to know too. But if you look at that profile, he says he works at Google. Think about that for a second. He claims this is an easy problem. But consider Google's approach to spam detection algorithms and see how there are so many false positives and innocent people getting screwed out of their ad accounts and livelihood. If this kind of stuff was easy, why hasn't anybody informed Google about it? I'm not…

I very specifically said that there were hard problems, just that this wasn't one ;)

In this case, a fairly straightforward account age rule would get you like 95% of the way there. My twitter account, which is 7 years old and has a few hundred followers and tweets once a week isn't going to benefit from this. You don't ban it. Similarly, you don't ban a 7 year old account with 10s of thousands of followers that's been doing the same kind of tweeting for 2 years and recently got a bunch of bot follows.

On the other hand, a 3 week old account with a ton of bot follows is suspicious. This'll miss older accounts that were unused and changed (e.g. if my account suddenly started tweeting 17x a day about divisive political content and suddenly got a bunch of bot follows, so you need slightly fancier approaches).

You probably further improve this with some kind of multifaceted account realness score based on a pagerank like analysis of followers (following bots lowers your score, as does being followed by them). And ofc you still ban the bots, but you don't punish any accounts above a certain threshold of "real".

The other part of it is that randomly sabotaging twitter accounts isn't going to happen very often, it costs money, and unless there's an ROI (extorting people), no one is going to do it except a handful of people for teh lulz or whatever. But importantly, most of those people will be bad at doing this kind of attack in a convincing way.

There are lots of difficult problems, but OP chose one that doesn't happen and is straightforward to address.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#249

Post by lostlogin »

tootie wrote: post #239
arpstick wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very convenient that a lot of bot accounts suddenly follows an account for people trying to amplify the accessibility of information of a trial that is suspiciously low profile considering the people involved.

Nobody prominent is involved. This case is so larded with misplaced expectations. We as of yet have no real proof any prominent people besides Prince Andrew may be tangentially implicated and no reason to think Maxwell has any compromising information if they were. And even if both those assumptions are true there's no reason they'd be pertinent to her trial. Her trial which is happening likely because the prosecutor…

> We as of yet have no real proof any prominent people besides Prince Andrew may be tangentially implicated

Isn’t that a reason to follow the case?

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#250

Post by mdoms »

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.

Ah there it is, the 'slippery slope fallacy' fallacy. Slippery slope arguments are not fundamentally fallacious. There's no such thing as "the slippery slope fallacy". There are slippery slope arguments, some of which are fallacious and many of which are not.

Please, stop cargo culting logical fallacies.

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