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An account was suspended

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Re: An account was suspended

#241

Post by BiteCode_dev »

lapcat wrote: post #217
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what your saying is that if you use twitter in a certain way, bots won't affect you much. I agree, and I do the same as you. But driving in a certain way to avoid pot holes should not be a good reason to avoid fixing the road.

> So what your saying is that if you use twitter in a certain way, bots won't affect you luch. No, I'm saying that I doubt spam has much of an effect on the experience of most Twitter users. Email spam is probably much worse for most people. [EDIT:] 1. I never mentioned ad blocking, so I'm not sure why 2 replies mentioned it. I mentioned blocking trends. 2. Even if you have trends, even if you have the algorithmic ti…

Ok, that's the HN bubble right there. Trending tweets are seen by millions of users. Lastest timeline is not the default. Ad blockers are used by a minority of people.

Re: An account was suspended

#242

Post by dangerface »

jorams wrote: post #200
Semaphor wrote: post #25

He goes into detail: > It’s the “after careful review” line that has me riled up tbh. I can understand why an automated system suspended it. Don’t lie to me! -- https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583063313948499969 And yeah, I have to agree. I absolutely hate it when providers (shipping companies are great at this) tell me obvious lies. Hey, I can handle issues and problems. What I can’t handle are lies.

Looking at the account, I don't see why it would be a lie in this case, or why the account shouldn't have been suspended after manual review. It posted 75 tweets in 26 minutes, self-admittedly "from multiple locations around the world.". All of those tweets link to an external website. It's spam, so the account got suspended for posting spam. The fact that it was posted by Ben Thompson doesn't change the fact that it…

75 tweets in 26 minutes isn't a lot tbh thats less than 500 bytes a minute an upset teen could easily do double that.

Re: An account was suspended

#243

Post by psychphysic »

Spooky23 wrote: post #165
psychphysic wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do you keep getting suspended?

There’s a lot of abuse reporting abuse. If you interact with people, there are psychos who will put you in some sort of list and constantly report you. I have a friend who is a minor public figure who gets taken down this way regularly.

I do wonder if people are tweeting out of character because twitter seems so good at provoking people.

The result is people get banned without objectively looking at the reasons.

That said I also know Twitter has quite odd rules about where it takes hardlines.

Re: An account was suspended

#244

Post by JacobThreeThree »

morby wrote: post #201
pentae wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they decided to terminate Parler not even giving them time to move hosts, that wasn't political censorship?

There were extremists on the site making calls to violence. A *private* entity deciding they don’t want to do business with a company because of that is neither censorship as a society would consider it nor is it problematic. More people and businesses should be willing to refuse business to entities that seek to harass, abuse, or promote violence to another group of people. What you’re worried about is governmental…

>A private entity deciding they don’t want to do business with a company

You mean like how OP decided not to do business with Amazon?

Re: An account was suspended

#245

Post by shadowgovt »

IshKebab wrote: post #237
shadowgovt wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the practical alternatives? I'd imagine this is an issue one would see less often on a Mastodon node, as nodes tend to have fewer users per node so moderators / admins can respond more promptly to system failures, and if one doesn't like how an admin is running affairs, one can switch nodes.

Offer reasonable options to get it reinstated of course.

I'm not sure what reasonable looks like when a system has 237 million daily active users and the reinstatement system itself would be intentionally gamed by adversaries.

Do we have any examples to draw from operating at that scale? Due to the Musk purchase, we have a rare public disclosure of a major tech giant's internal workings where Twitter claims (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/07/twitter-s...) it suspends half a million spam accounts a day. It's trivial to file an appeal, so (because the attackers are by no means disincentivized from appealing) that's probably on the order of 250,000 appeals a day if we assume even half the banned won't bother (and I think that assumption is low, since a reasonable system should probably make it trivial to file an appeal, therefore people will). How does one reasonably handle that? To scale up to thousands of humans handling it, you'd need strict rules to even approximate getting the same result across everyone, and if strict rules worked you could code them into the auto-ban system.

One solution might actually be "Stop having 'get every human being on the service' as a goal," but then sucks for the people who can't use the thing.

Re: An account was suspended

#246

Post by rchaud »

Semaphor wrote: post #23
excerionsforte wrote: post #3

https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229?c... gives an idea why it happened. He'll get it back.

Note that he goes into detail why he is so pissed: > It’s the “after careful review” line that has me riled up tbh. I can understand why an automated system suspended it. Don’t lie to me! -- https://nitter.kavin.rocks/benthompson/status/15830633139484...

This is childish though. Ben has written about Twitter long enough to know how it works.

Careful review doesn't mean that a human reviewed it, just that a group of them were highly paid to implement the system of rules that banned him.

Re: An account was suspended

#247

Post by danso »

michaelmcdonald wrote: post #2

Ben's account is already un-suspended, but only because he has a major presence and large audience (I would be shocked if people at Twitter didn't see this minutes into it happening or if Ben didn't have some direct line to various high up employees there). For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.

I've played devil's advocate elsewhere in the thread, but this is such a petty and irrelevant kerfuffle, as far as Big-Tech-Censorship goes.

By Ben's own description of how the @StratecheryINT account was operated [0] -- i.e. "a new account that has posted a bunch of links (all Stratechery interviews) in a short amount of time, from multiple locations around the world." -- this is exactly the kind of low-hanging fruit that we'd want Twitter spam-detectors to cull with minimal time and resources.

Not only b/c of the obvious spam characteristics, but because it was a days-old account with few (if any) followers/followings. Even if it were a mistake, very little of value has been lost, since every tweet was the result of an automated script (i.e. simple to make a new account, and recreate the content that had thus far zero engagement).

Do people seriously think every such case -- an empty days-old account suddenly doing spam-like activity -- should be manually reviewed? That's a daily waste of human resources for tens of thousands (edit: actually it's millions [1]) of trivial permaban decisions -- exactly the kind of thing that an autoban algorithm can efficiently handle.

> For the rest of us peasants: good luck getting help.

I have the same sentiment, but with a different angle. Verified accounts like Thompson's get a lot of leeway with bending/breaking the rules before facing actual punishment. If a lesser known user deployed a selenium-twitter-spam-bot on AWS, it's possible both their spam bot and their real account would be permanently suspended

[0] https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/1583062865116041229

[1] https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237583058952192?ref_sr...

Re: An account was suspended

#248

Post by ziddoap »

lapcat wrote: post #217
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what your saying is that if you use twitter in a certain way, bots won't affect you much. I agree, and I do the same as you. But driving in a certain way to avoid pot holes should not be a good reason to avoid fixing the road.

> So what your saying is that if you use twitter in a certain way, bots won't affect you luch. No, I'm saying that I doubt spam has much of an effect on the experience of most Twitter users. Email spam is probably much worse for most people. [EDIT:] 1. I never mentioned ad blocking, so I'm not sure why 2 replies mentioned it. I mentioned blocking trends. 2. Even if you have trends, even if you have the algorithmic ti…

>most Twitter users

One level up you just described things you do (adblock, non-default settings, etc.). You're here chit-chatting on one of the more technical forums out there. I don't think you can, with a straight face, say that your experience is representative of most users.

Re: An account was suspended

#249

Post by rchaud »

hk__2 wrote: post #46
Tade0 wrote: post #13

I wonder why is the ban permanent right off the bat? To me it sounds reasonable to ban an alleged spam account for a limited period e.g. 24h - spammers won't bother waiting and will just create another account just like they normally do. An abandoned account can then be deleted. Can anyone point out any obvious flaws in my reasoning?

> I wonder why is the ban permanent right off the bat? Because that’s simpler? > spammers won't bother waiting and will just create another account just like they normally do What makes you think they will not bother waiting 24h? If I were managing a spambots farm I guess I would rather wait 24h than go through the hassle of re-creating a Twitter account.

You could do both. Time is money, so you could create a new account and start spamming right away, and log back in to the old one after 24h to see if the suspension has been lifted.

Re: An account was suspended

#250

Post by [deleted] »

bigsparky wrote: post #73
hk__2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was on YouTube. This thread is related to Twitter, where you cannot report a tweet for "misinformation".

Yes you can "Misleading Info Reporting Flow - Some of you can report Tweets for containing misinformation. This is currently available in limited testing to some people in Australia, Brazil, the Philippines, South Korea, Spain, and the US, though we are exploring how to expand. These reports are reviewed and acted on independently from other Tweet reporting flows (e.g. for abuse), as this test flow is used to inform…

[deleted]
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