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A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

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Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#551

Post by account42 »

ahtihn wrote: post #316
TheRealPomax wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real stinger is that there's no legal requirement to compensate someone for wrongdoing. Ban someone by accident, and then in a "review" uphold the ban despite overwhelming evidence? That should be a fine, paid out in part to the wronged party.

Twitter is entitled to deny service to anyone for any reason. Why should there be compensation for "accidental" bans?

Do you really think it is the best interest of society to give megacorporations free reign to dictate who can use our most popular communication platforms that have captured the market to the extend that many are only reachible via those platforms. We don't let electricity and water companies just cut people off because some machine learning algorithm though those people did soemthing wrong.

If twitter does not want the responsibility that should come with administrating the public square than THEY can find something else to do.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#552

Post by account42 »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #362
eckesicle wrote: post #179

It's interesting to read the comments here and the debate around whether social media counts as a public square or not. Ultimately, the web, and social media, is where a majority of our citizens spend a large chunk of their time. While it's certainly true, that you don't _need_ to access them to live your life, for the vast majority of us it would be more than an inconvenience to be banned. In all other aspects of ou…

We want government to run or regulate these systems as long as we trust the government but what happens when we don't trust the government anymore? Like for example if in this years midterms there's a Congressional supermajority, and then the president is elected from that same party two years later and the courts are of that party. Will we really want government regulations if things? There would be widespread mistr…

If you don't trust your government then you have bigger issues. And that governmant could always choose to start to regulate Twitter to their advantage if they have that much public support no matter what regulations there are now.

Also, I think if any single party can get that much of a majority (or even just a majority on its own) then your already have an extremely unhealthy democracy even if such setups are quite common in "developed" countries.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#553

Post by account42 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #346
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…

The author responded in the appeal with "You cannot possibly be this dense." If you want to win an appeal, starting by accusing your appeal reviewer of being dense isn't a good strategy. I wouldn't be surprised if they have a rule that covers this type of behavior in appeals, and the appeal was denied due to language instead of the content itself. Is it fair? From a content moderation perspective, no it's not. But I…

If the appeal reviewer feels targeted by that accusation then they deserve it.

Those less dense would understand that the thing being called dense is whatever system made the initial accusation and resulting ban (i.e. Twitter as a whole) and not the random support person processing the ticket who the user has no way of knowing and has never interacted with.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#554

Post by account42 »

dorkwood wrote: post #547
wswope wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re unable to access your email notification settings related to the account you’re locked out of, and have received any non-transactional emails related to the account, you can email their legal team regarding a CANSPAM violation to get a real human on the case (or a payday if they choose not to respond). May not apply to your circumstances; just throwing it out as I’ve had it work before in a similar context.

Wow, thanks for this, but unfortunately I disabled all those emails in the past.

Then your best option is to move to EU (or other regions with adequate consumer protections) and send a Art. 17 GDPR request. That or try to get your local government to better advocate for you. Probably neither is a very realistic option for your but I'm glad that at least some places are starting to look out of tech users even if we still need a lot more.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#555

Post by nurettin »

lapcat wrote: post #391
vorticalbox wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why you do not use a work/professional account for things other than work.

How do you judge what's work and what's not work? For many people, such as the self-employed, their online presence is part of their brand, and Twitter is professional networking. This applies to both Craig and myself.

It is very easy unless shitposting is your dayjob.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#556

Post by TheRealPomax »

ahtihn wrote: post #316
TheRealPomax wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real stinger is that there's no legal requirement to compensate someone for wrongdoing. Ban someone by accident, and then in a "review" uphold the ban despite overwhelming evidence? That should be a fine, paid out in part to the wronged party.

Twitter is entitled to deny service to anyone for any reason. Why should there be compensation for "accidental" bans?

If you only see an accidental ban in this story, you need to reread the story. Twitter, by way of its employees, violated its own policies in the follow-up.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#557

Post by TheRealPomax »

lifeformed wrote: post #308
TheRealPomax wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "want", Twitter (or youtube, or facebook, etc. etc.) can't in a million years afford content moderation because of the sheer firehose of content. They'd literally have to employ everyone on the planet to get enough moderators in every language for every tweet, post, video, etc. on the platform. And then only one company would have enough moderators. Moderators are a finite resource, there aren't even enough…

You don't need human eyes on every single tweet, just need enough people to review the flagged content. You could still have algorithms flag things and rank them by confidence levels. You could also hide the content first and queue it for human review instead of auto-banning the user. It's a lot of work, but I feel like there's a lot more that could be done.

It feels like you underestimate how much content exists on twitter.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#558

Post by TheRealPomax »

furyofantares wrote: post #336
TheRealPomax wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "want", Twitter (or youtube, or facebook, etc. etc.) can't in a million years afford content moderation because of the sheer firehose of content. They'd literally have to employ everyone on the planet to get enough moderators in every language for every tweet, post, video, etc. on the platform. And then only one company would have enough moderators. Moderators are a finite resource, there aren't even enough…

There's under a billion tweets per day. If you need to employ every human to moderate this you're saying it takes about 9 working days to moderate a single tweet. If a moderator had to approve every tweet before it goes live, a terrible idea and yes, very expensive, I think a moderator could do a dozen per minute, rather than one every 72 hours like your logic implies.

We're taking the "every human on the planet" seriously instead of considering it hyperbole for "we would need to hire an insanely order of magnitude higher of people than are qualified for that job"?

And humans aren't robots: you can't moderate dozens of tweets a minute and still meaningfully moderate. You can do that for maybe a few minutes before any pretense of moderation has been replaced by mindlessly clicking "okay" until the light turns on and the pellet-dispenser goes "ding!"

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#559

Post by TheRealPomax »

colpabar wrote: post #328
TheRealPomax wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "want", Twitter (or youtube, or facebook, etc. etc.) can't in a million years afford content moderation because of the sheer firehose of content. They'd literally have to employ everyone on the planet to get enough moderators in every language for every tweet, post, video, etc. on the platform. And then only one company would have enough moderators. Moderators are a finite resource, there aren't even enough…

Your reply assumes that these businesses must continue to exist at all costs, effective moderation be damned. If it’s true that they cannot afford good moderation, then maybe it’s not a sustainable business model? I know online content platforms are wildly different than other industries, which is why these problems exist at all. We don’t seem to have good solutions yet. But we wouldn’t have any issue declaring that…

It does not: it assumes that corporations have their own interest in mind, and are kept alive at the cost of "as long as they are profitable for (most of) the owners".

Whether we, the people who have to suffer them, want them to exist or not does not particularly enter into this. If that's the part we want to take aim at (and maybe we should? or maybe we shouldn't?) then that's an important but completely separate issue.

Re: A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter

#560

Post by TheRealPomax »

swayvil wrote: post #324
TheRealPomax wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "want", Twitter (or youtube, or facebook, etc. etc.) can't in a million years afford content moderation because of the sheer firehose of content. They'd literally have to employ everyone on the planet to get enough moderators in every language for every tweet, post, video, etc. on the platform. And then only one company would have enough moderators. Moderators are a finite resource, there aren't even enough…

They need to crowdsource the moderation job. Something like voting and flagging but cleverer. Of course this might deprive them of the ability to censor at will.

Why would crowdsourcing be more reliable than initial NN filtering? And of course, let's consider application bias: do you think the reasonable folks would volunteer to moderate twitter, or only the people who think it's a way for them to manipulate the content that shows up on the platform?
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