Live data from Hacker News

Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

patriotone.substack.com

281–290 of 391 posts

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#281
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.

"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.

The meaning is clear, and kudos to Twitter for defining it well. But if you think through the usual meanings of the word "artificial" and apply it to this situation, you end up with some amusing conclusions.

Definition of artificial

  1 : humanly contrived (see contrive sense 1b) often on a natural model : man-made 
  // an artificial limb 
  // artificial diamonds
  2a : having existence in legal, economic, or political theory
  b : caused or produced by a human and especially social or political agency 
  // an artificial price advantage 
  // Within these companies, qualified women run into artificial barriers that prevent them from advancing to top positions in management.— James J. Kilpatrick
  3a : lacking in natural or spontaneous quality 
  // an artificial smile 
  // an artificial excitement
  b : imitation, sham 
  // artificial flavor
  4 : based on differential morphological characters not necessarily indicative of natural relationships 
  // an artificial key for plant identification
  5 obsolete : artful, cunning
Definition 1 doesn't apply: Twitter is an artificial construct to start with.

Definition 2 doesn't apply, or if it does it's a bit of a stretch.

Definition 3 clearly applies. So, "lacking in natural or spontaneous quality".

So, what "amplification" activities on Twitter have a natural or spontaneous quality? Intentional clickbait or flamebait? Using tools to schedule posts in advance to maximize engagement? Jumping on trending hashtags? Paying a person to manage a Twitter account for you? Setting up a bot to automatically post articles from a website? All of these are allowed and can be used to amplify information, but none sound "natural" or "spontaneous" to me.

The meaning is clear and Twitter's rules are (IMO) very reasonable, but there is definitely something euphemistic about the phrase. The literal phrase would be "disallowed amplification", because the only real criteria for what is considered "artificial" are Twitter's own rules for what is allowed and what is not.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Your proposal is quite naive and displays the type of aggressive ignorance all too common among software developers. Aged Twitter accounts with thousands of followers are available for sale if you know where to look. They don't even cost very much. Brigading attacks by flagging content in bad faith are also very common for political and ideological reasons.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#283

Is there a good case for why someone who doesn't use twitter would create an account and use it now? Trying to figure out what organic growth for them looks like.

A few months ago I created an account for a website I have, followed a few accounts, tweeted once and was then banned for literally no reason. All of this happened in less than 24h. After that, I try to avoid Twitter when possible. It's also a cesspool of entitled pseudo-intellectuals (both left and right leaning), so I don't miss it much, honestly.

I signed up and was immediately banned after following 3 different accounts in fairly rapid succession. I had already been "following" these accounts for some time by directly going to their twitter pages on the website and had them bookmarked, so I just went to each person directly from the bookmarks and hit "follow." This is apparently "Unusual activity." In order to prove I wasn't a bot and continue to use their service, they wanted my phone number (I signed up through the website and don't want the app on my phone). I really don't care about tweeting myself and it was just for the convenience factor of having the accounts all in a single place without having to go to different bookmarks each time, so it's not a big deal to not have an account. It's all publicly available, although they're trying to make it harder to navigate twitter unless you have an account and signed in.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#284
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s building a community center but not letting the fat kids come play.

Every community center I am familiar with has rules about the types of events that can be held there. Even more so when they're owned by specific interest groups.

Yeah, but those rules are set by the communities that use them.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#285

@dang can we update the link to this one please? At the moment people are just reacting to the headline and there doesn’t seem to be much substance to the debate due to this. https://patriotone.substack.com/p/twitter-suspension

"Just reacting" is questioning Twitter's motives to suspend an account for reporting court proceedings of the most scandalous case in recent US history which entangles everyone on the top political echelons, wall street, hollywood, academia and big tech. Sure go ahead supress the discussion here too.

> in recent US history

*in recent international history.

This goes far beyond the US. The UK's Royal Family and other very high profile people all over the planet are implicated, in addition to US citizens.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#286
post #61

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

Great. Why did twitter delete this one?

Doesn't it seem a pretty strong indicator that the claim they got censored for reporting on Maxwell is untrue because more popular, more credible people aren't being suspended. If the goal is to supress news about Maxwell it seems pretty clear that suspending some small anonymous account would not acheive that.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#287
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah well, if we have "reputable journalists" on the case then we don't need some lowlife reporting on it.

Welcome to HN! Please check out the guidelines for posting comments, as I believe this one runs afoul of several of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Shut the fuck up, nerd.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#288
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

Ok, let's change the URL to the latter one from https://twitter.com/TrackerTrial, which doesn't say anything.

Re: Twitter suspends account tracking Maxwell trial

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Just reacting" is questioning Twitter's motives to suspend an account for reporting court proceedings of the most scandalous case in recent US history which entangles everyone on the top political echelons, wall street, hollywood, academia and big tech. Sure go ahead supress the discussion here too.

>Twitter's motives to suspend an account for reporting court proceedings It's clear Twitter suspended the account for TOS violations, and not the subject matter. I have no dog in this fight, do not follow the case, but a quick search of Twitter yielded these not-suspended accounts that are "reporting court proceedings" as you say: https://twitter.com/USvMaxwell https://twitter.com/Trial_Tracker https://twitter.com/Cu…

It's always TOS violations when convenient. Plenty of accounts violate TOS and go untouched.

Not casting judgment on this specific case, but the ease with which it's possible to selectively apply TOS to bans should be concerning to free speech oriented people.

Just make a broad TOS and you can ban anybody you like.

Post reply on HN