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Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

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Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#131

Post by ctvo »

saurik wrote: post #92
tehlike wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please build a system with 100% availability under load and with no false positive. I'll wait.

> Please build a system with 100% availability under load and with no false positive. I'll wait. Seriously? This is absolutely trivial: you don't build a system like this in the first place , as whatever is failing here--and 100% if it is a system actively designed to prevent people from posting links to their own timeline--isn't providing value: it is just a bigger surface in which there are going to be random bugs…

A link preview adds value to those reading the posts. Because it can sometimes fail to process a link and prevent users from posting links is not a sign of sure malice, it's possibly incompetence (in the way the system was designed or implemented, in the business rules of requiring it to validate successfully before a link can be posted, etc.).

I'm a little lost at what your point is because if you think the above is malice, there's malice in every poorly implemented feature. Say Instagram does a rough check to ensure no nudity is contained in the images you're posting and that system goes down preventing you from posting to your own IG -- that too is malice?

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#132

Post by numpad0 »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #13
bombcar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the kind of thing that's interesting to document for a potential anti-trust case. Blocking the entire domain because it's "spammy" could be argued as fair - but only blocking the main links is more suspect.

antitrust? Is twitter a monopoly now?

Attempts to monopolize is illegal too.

Antitrust laws is not about waiting for a monopoly to establish itself and then deconstructing it, but about preventing one.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#133

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mikeyouse wrote: post #114
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know what section 230 repeal has to do with it. Companies would still be able to block random links like this if section 230 is repealed; they’d probably do it more often.

Repealing 230 would literally kill large swaths of the internet. If platforms like Twitter or Reddit were legally responsible for what their users post, they would need to institute white lists to avoid being bankrupted. Can you imagine the amount of low-level casual defamation across the entirety of Facebook? Or Reddit? The amount of copyrighted material stolen and posted? There would be an overnight industry of peo…

Heck, under the precedent that Section 230 was meant to overturn, Twitter could sue HN for a lot of what people are saying right here. I struggle to even engage with the idea sometimes because you're 100% right that it doesn't make sense.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#134

Post by registeredcorn »

can16358p wrote: post #57
tehlike wrote: post #11

I bet it's likely a bug. There were times i wasnt able to post LinkedIn urls in the past. I bet it's their crawler/integrity service having hard time. Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence.

Plausible deniability. Design the system in a way that it'd pick up competitor links as spam (without directly blacklisting them explicitly) using fine-tuned training data. In case of media attention, tell it's an error and ML algorithms are blackboxes, and take action to "whitelist" those domains only when needed. Yeah, we buy it, Twitter.

I'm not saying your wrong, but that just sounds like an incredible amount of work for something that would presumably be discovered anyway, you know?

Wouldn't it be much easier to simply blacklist and put out some bland statement about "not supporting 'hate speech'" or something? It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it just matters that they paint the picture of them opposing something "bad". Lying just seems a lot easier than going to all of that effort.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#135

Post by tehlike »

clumpthump wrote: post #98
fartcannon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, maybe let's assume malice. Maybe its a false positive and a bunch of people stop using twitter, Facebook, google, apple, or Microsoft as a result. That is less harmful (some might say it's good) than the opposite, where big corps use our collective desire to forgive as a tool to exploit us. You can apply that saying to your wife and kids. Or your neighbour. Big corps that make money off exploiting peoples n…

Hanlon's Razor is, I believe, a good rule of thumb, but people keep using it in situations such as this one where it's not just potentially malice (wanting to harm someone for little other reason than wanting to see them hurt or wanting to hurt) but also greed/self-interest. Hanlon's Razor as stated makes sense to me. I see a lot more stupidity in the world than I see people wanting to hurt for no other reason. But g…

This issue is such a small thing that it is much more likely to be an unintended issue than otherwise.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#136

Post by bogwog »

ufo wrote: post #126
pid-1 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never assume malice when it can be sufficiently explained by a bug or incompetence. My 100% baseless opinion is that most evil in big orgs comes from emergent behavior. Ant colonies are capable of really complex stuff, even though individual ants are somewhat simple beings. Likewise, a corp can do evil stuff even though all individuals who are part of it aren't actively seeking to do harm. Since we can't ask a corp…

One story that often comes up: automated ML systems will have false positives every once in a while. But when the false positive affects a big customer it is fixed more promptly than when it affects a competitor...

One of many examples of why we shouldn’t hold corporations to the low standards we hold individuals.

I.e. never give a corporation the benefit of the doubt. They’re the most important producers of our economy, and doing so allows them to be lazy (aka the complete opposite of “productive”)

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#137

Post by colpabar »

stimpson_j_cat wrote: post #129
colpabar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

It's not a bug to disallow "distribution of hacked material" in your Terms of Service. If you think it was political, you should certainly inform the FEC! They found that Twitter had acted "for commercial reasons and not for the purpose of influencing an election" so they'd appreciate the heads up.

ah yes, because when a federal agency doesn't punish a multi billion dollar corporation, we all know it's because they definitely didn't do anything wrong. They're so trustworthy!

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#138

Post by anotherman554 »

user3939382 wrote: post #19
rvz wrote: post #7

Ok? They are a private company and they can block links that they don't like. Facebook has done the exact same thing and nothing happened. You are free to complain, criticise them, scream at these companies or protest, but like I have said many times before they will not change and it is futile to believe that they ever will as long as they 'moderate' or do whatever they want to do on their own platforms. So unsurpri…

> They are a private company I've been hearing this a lot lately, surprisingly from people who consider themselves to be politically left. I say surprisingly because historically, leftist ideology has been quick to solve problems with corporate behavior with regulations, whereas traditionally it's been the right pushing laissez-faire. In any case, guys - private company doesn't mean your behaviors and policies aren't…

"I've been hearing this a lot lately, surprisingly from people who consider themselves to be politically left. I say surprisingly because historically, leftist ideology has been quick to solve problems with corporate behavior with regulations, whereas traditionally it's been the right pushing laissez-faire."

On this web site when I hear people talking about controlling what social media platforms do via regulation, most of the time it seems to me like passing a law where the government says the following journalists must have articles each week on the New York Times front page. (And none of them are actually going to be journalists so much as "journalists")

Other people see it more like passing a law saying the telephone company can't block your telephone access.

I guess my point is framing every discussion of social media as "regulation good or bad" isn't very useful.

Re: Twitter Blocks Linking to Mastodon.social

#139

Post by carapace »

tehlike wrote: post #95
carapace wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember the time that the "evil corps" conspired together to rip off their own developers to the tune of several billion dollars? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... (The suit was filed against Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, but it turned out that "dozens" of other tech companies got involved as well (Pando Daily had good coverage https://web.a…

You are mixing one issue with another. I am making a very specific claim that this issue is not malice, either a system with false positive or a system that has a bug.

FWIW, I agree. You're almost certainly right that this is just a false positive or a bug.

I'm just pointing out that the "evil corps" stereotyped has been earned by past events. The folks who are suspicious of corporate behaviour and motives have their reasons.

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