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An account was suspended

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Re: An account was suspended

#261

Post by danso »

lapcat wrote: post #224
rchaud wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The account in question posted 76 tweets in under 30 mins. Have you posted with this level of frequency, from different IPs? You may not need to worry if you have not.

> Have you posted with this level of frequency, from different IPs? I don't know, maybe? I tend to tweet along with Apple keynotes, for example. My IP changes whenever I switch from wifi to cellular.

In the thread, Ben alluded to automated, possibly distributed activity:

> For the record, this is 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.

It seems obvious that the tweets were automated -- during some periods, it tweeted every ~10 seconds. If it were switching IPs at that same rate, especially if the IPs were in known AWS/Azure/etc ranges, then it's obviously not going to be authentic human activity.

In your personal situation, even if you had IP changes between every tweet -- I assume your account has some tenure, and is more than just a few days old? Twitter keeps track of all the IPs you've ever logged in from, and for older known accounts, there's probably more tolerance for weird activity (e.g. bouncing between VPNs) than a days-old account that has done nothing but suspicious spam.

Re: An account was suspended

#262

Post by Dove »

I can't decide whether to be darkly amused or just depressed, watching millions of humans learn together, as if for the first time, that Government Is Hard.

Much ink has been spilled on the topic of governing well. It could fairly be called the entire output of now risen and fallen civilizations. Institutions such as laws, rights, courts, judges, and citizenship are many millenia old, and people have always been willing to pay to get them. Yes, these digital empires are a new beast, but surely there are better options than running around, reacting to emergencies, helping out people with inner circle access, laying down really ineffective law for everyone else, like some sort of overworked bronze age monarch?

Re: An account was suspended

#263

Post by Zak »

themitigating wrote: post #132
Zak wrote: post #18

I suspect this kind of problem is unavoidable when a large fraction of the world uses a centralized many-to-many communication platform. Moderation is always going to be a cost center for such a platform and there's a big gap between good enough moderation to prevent a mass exodus and what most of us would likely call good . Using decentralized tools might improve the situation.

Why would a decentralized system not run into these problems?

Competition, mostly. If users can shop around for different service providers or even self-host, the approach to moderation can be an important differentiator.

Re: An account was suspended

#264

Post by Zak »

themitigating wrote: post #131
impossiblefork wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to be centralized though, and I think centralization is the cause of both the moral problems (political bans, censorship, etc.) and the difficulties running these things. Without centralization it's just some kind of trust network, and since the messages are open it's a much easier problem to filter away unwanted material than to deal with things like e-mail spam. The reason people don't is simply tha…

I'm not sure if you meant it the way I read it but "people" could also be users. The bigger the service the bigger the audience. Also, who was banned from twitter because of their politics?

> The bigger the service the bigger the audience.

This is not true with decentralized services. If, for example, I have a Mastodon account and you want to follow me, we don't have to use the same service provider. You don't even have to use Mastodon software. You could use something else that speaks ActivityPub like Pixelfed or Friendica.

Re: An account was suspended

#265

Post by MikePlacid »

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…

Your logic is flawed on many levels, and I will be glad to parse the errors after I have my breakfast and nothing more important emerges. Just one point for now:

> What you’re worried about is governmental action and is not equivalent here.

My kids tried to point me in the same direction. I’ve just pointed them to the router and said: I am a private citizen paying for Internet connection in this house. In 24 hours this router will be configured to drop all connections to Amazon, Facebook and Twitter. Prepare yourself.

Boy, how worried they were. Never seen any person more worried in my life. See, they use Facebook for studies and Amazon for buying textbooks, so why I am so cruel?

I said: exactly my point. I was not that cruel though, but probably I should have.

Re: An account was suspended

#266

Post by brazzy »

celeritascelery wrote: post #256
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.

This is another power imbalance that is so frustrating. The account was “permanently suspended”, which you think means permanently suspended. But that only applies to normies. All the words are meaningless if twitter says otherwise. It’s really like living under a medieval king who is a law unto himself.

Wrong tree to bark up.

"Permanently" only means there is no time limit with an automatic reactivation afterwards.

It's absolutely possible for a "normie" to get a permanent ban reviewed and lifted.

Re: An account was suspended

#267

Post by BitwiseFool »

JacobThreeThree wrote: post #239
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.

A federated system like Mastadon seems to be a good technical solution, but I think the more simple solution is to spend your valuable time on platforms that have better moderation, or invest in building your own website/platform.

The proposed solution is simple, but the problem has always been audience and discovery. Even if you managed to find a perfect platform with a decent userbase, you would still need to rely on people sharing links to your content on the more widely known platforms. Very rarely do people stumble upon blogs and niche social media sites.

Re: An account was suspended

#268

Post by altairprime »

danso wrote: post #247
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 frui…

How does banning this account reduce spam?

Removing it from the search results and unlinking its @handle in tweets from other accounts would have been enough, if it was spam, to prevent it from being shown at all to anyone.

If it’s useful for non-spam people who want to follow it from an offsite link, it’ll gain valid followers that can hint towards undoing its shadow ban over a long period of time — and by not doing follow activity of any sort in return, it’s clearly not playing the follow spam game in order to try and mask itself as anything other than a one-way feed account, so there’s no harm in letting active users follow it.

It just reads like Twitter isn’t able to distinguish how it treats RSS feeds from how it treats spambots, due solely to a limited stable of technical reactions.

Re: An account was suspended

#269

Post by lapcat »

danso wrote: post #261
lapcat wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you posted with this level of frequency, from different IPs? I don't know, maybe? I tend to tweet along with Apple keynotes, for example. My IP changes whenever I switch from wifi to cellular.

In the thread, Ben alluded to automated, possibly distributed activity: > For the record, this is 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. It seems obvious that the tweets were automated -- during some periods, it tweeted every ~10 seconds. If it were switching IPs at that same rate, especially if the IPs were in k…

> there's probably more tolerance for weird activity

Well, my Twitter account has been suspended at least 4 times for dumb reasons or no apparent reason at all.

> nothing but suspicious spam

It was not spam. Tweeting is not spam. Tweeting a lot is not even spam. Unsolicited replies, for example, can be spam. Ben's account did not interact with anyone. There was no unsolicited interaction whatsoever.

Also, there was no violation of Twitter rules.

Re: An account was suspended

#270

Post by JulianHC »

rchaud wrote: post #215
rossdavidh wrote: post #129

So, this all falls under the category heading of "this private company's product or service is now too important to have it denied for arbitrary or unclear reasons". This is, in fact, not a new problem; we even have a word for this kind of good or service: "utility". There was a time when phone service, electricity, etc. was just an ordinary private company that you contracted with, who could do whatever private comp…

So Twitter would be treated like PBS? I'd love the see the faces of those 'free speech absolutists' if that ended up happening. If they thought Twitter censors too much now...

It is the official channel of many governments and worldwide organizations. The Royal Family twitter account posted the news about Queen Elizabeth's death before BBC announcement.
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