A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter • Hacker News Board

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#181

Post by junon » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

bencollier49 wrote: post #173

To be honest this is where something like the GDPR does do important work. In this case, Twitter have formed an opinion about this user (which they may have shared more widely). It is important to be able to find out what that opinion is and have it corrected if it is in error.

Most likely not. This is most likely a machine learning model that has a confidence score of pornographic material etc. and has mis-scored this post high enough to initiate an automatic suspension.

I doubt they use prior account activity as a metric.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#182

Post by gambiting » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

ISL wrote: post #169

gambiting wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It couldn't, but what all of these companies could absolutely do is pair automated moderation with human review. When AI flags something as innapropriate, a human has to sign it off before it's removed or the account suspended. The only exception for it is when content matches a known hash for illegal content - then it should be removed automatically.

How many automated-review actions do you think Twitter performs in a day that would require such a review? How many seconds might each human-review take? What false-positive rate is acceptable on that human-review?

Is that an argument that they shouldn't do it then? Because right now, if this article is to be believed, they don't do manual review even on appeals. That's obviously not ok.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#183

Post by srvmshr » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:23 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #16

mkl95 wrote: post #10

> Overnight, I received a response that my appeal had been denied. So a human being, someone who works at Twitter dot com, looked at that video, looked back at the rule it was breaking, looked once again at the video, and went “Yeah, this all checks out.” My guess is that appeals are either processed by some simple code or offloaded to some cheap labour service - such as Amazon Mechanical Turkey or some sweatshop in…

It’s Mechanical Turk . Although Mechanical Turkey sounds cooler. :)

For sake of correctness its Mechanical Türqiye :D /jk

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#184

Post by kkklloufffr » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

troymc wrote: post #159

mikkergp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say moderate without AI are you suggesting human moderation? This is not really a good solution to this problem either. Paying people to traumatize themselves by watching video after video or reading tweet after tweet of the worst content society has to offer is dehumanizing.

AFAIK, most of the moderation on Reddit is done by unpaid humans, not AI. Reddit isn't perfect, of course, but their approach does scale.

Moderators on Reddit are extremely petty and vindictive and I have hypothesized for a long time that this is because they are not paid with money.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#185

Post by drhodes » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

tiborsaas wrote: post #66

> So I appealed with my trademark good humor. Maybe it was not the right time to be concise and witty. You just can't know who reads it, which culture, where and what mood they are in.

Calling the support staff "dense" was probably not the right move..

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#186

Post by emn13 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

JackFr wrote: post #158

ricardobeat wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a very naive argument. If your friends and family are on Facebook, your work contacts across the country are on Twitter, the only forums left alive on the web are on Reddit, how can you not need them? These things have replaced existing connections you used to have via other channels. You can not step away without severing them now, it is no longer a matter of personal choice.

> If your friends and family are on Facebook, your work contacts across the country are on Twitter, the only forums left alive on the web are on Reddit, how can you not need them? You can absolutely step away from them and it’s not even hard. Call, text or email your friends and family. It’s far more intimate and frankly more satisfying. You lose the ability to broadcast a curated persona, but honestly in the grand s…

I did this for years. I regret it. It's overly simplistic to think this works well. The devil is in the details; and being a decent human being also means adapting to other's wishes, needs and habits. Being a small-scale dictator about modes of communication isn't great.

You _will_ miss out of valuable personal communication if you choose to go this route. It's not just about an online curated persona.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#187

Post by OrangeMonkey » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

spinny wrote: post #174

OrangeMonkey wrote: post #12

This is how big tech does damage to humans. Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations that not only ban people for reasons many people ag…

Not to mention the Orwellian proposition: "delete the pic we deemed wrong so we can unban you". Apparently it's hard to just delete the offending pic, it's better to teach you a lesson and make you do it. There are four lights

I agree - it’s modern day struggle sessions.

There are four lights.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#188

Post by mantas » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

ISL wrote: post #93

spicyusername wrote: post #7

It seems like the problem with many of these tech companies (and many modern companies in general) is that they've scaled faster than they have the ability to operate properly. "How can we possibly moderate properly without AI?" is really just another way of saying "We don't want to pay the money it's going to cost to moderate effectively and we're going to cross our fingers that we can solve problems caused by techn…

Do you think that Twitter could possibly survive as a company without large amounts of automated moderation?

Do we need Twitter that much? Is it worth ruining the society in the name of having twitter or a similar social media?

90s and 00s with all sorts of independent discussion boards were great. Somehow moderation kept up without crappy AI. I can’t see a single benefit of Twitter/FB/etc over fragmented forums as a user.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#189

Post by galleywest200 » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

troymc wrote: post #159

mikkergp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say moderate without AI are you suggesting human moderation? This is not really a good solution to this problem either. Paying people to traumatize themselves by watching video after video or reading tweet after tweet of the worst content society has to offer is dehumanizing.

AFAIK, most of the moderation on Reddit is done by unpaid humans, not AI. Reddit isn't perfect, of course, but their approach does scale.

As someone who helps moderate a very large subreddit I can assure you we write our own bots to help. A lot of stuff is manually reviewed "in queue" and we review any complains in modmail manually.

But there are too many comment for us unpaid internet janitors to not use our own robots. Also since we are not paid our caring levels are lower, thus heavy use of regex and automation.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#190

Post by hackerhasid » Sat, Jul 23, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

> So a human being, someone who works at Twitter dot com, looked at that video, looked back at the rule it was breaking, looked once again at the video, and went “Yeah, this all checks out.”

I am going to go out on a limb and assume that the people handling these appeals are expected to hit a certain number per day whether explicitly or not. And to paraphrase Charlie Munger, there's the incentive and this is the outcome.

I imagine someone sitting at a screen showing a queue of hundreds of thousands of posts awaiting review. Maybe there's even a leaderboard showing which employee has reviewed the most this month. Why waste their time watching the video in its entirety? Easier to just deny the appeal and move on to the next.