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An account was suspended

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Re: An account was suspended

#271

Post by jandrese »

AlfeG wrote: post #72
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. My account got suspended a few years ago. But to be honest, it was a blessing in disguise. Twitter for me was a huge time sink, even though I followed really interesting people talking about things I was really interesting. But once I got a forced detox, I realised I just gained back hours a week to do other things. Get off Twitter. Even better, turn off that TV.

I got my Amazon account deleted. I have old credit card linked to AWS with billing address in one city of Ukraine. Few weeks later after city been occupied I got message from Amazon that my account is locked due to sanctions. They give me ability to comply by removing offending credit card. But I can't do this because account is locked. I've got zero human response only broken scripts from support that I need to logi…

One gets the impression that the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing in big corporations like this. They have probably never had to call their own tech support.

It is easy to see how this could happen. AWS Sanctions compliance team: ok, the government says we need to shut down Russian accounts, so we will lock any account using a Russian payment method. False positives can just call tech support to prove that they are not bots and have the offending payment method replaced.

Meanwhile over in support: Boss: remember it is corporate policy that a CSR may not make any changes to billing information for a customer’s account after the stolen cards incident.

Re: An account was suspended

#272

Post by adrr »

rchaud wrote: post #196
mritchie712 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair, stripe has thousands of businesses and real money on the line. they are going to get some things wrong. My experience (in one of their target markets of b2b SaaS) has been flawless.

But Stripe should provide timelier service than Twitter precisely because there is real money on the line. If Twitter suspends my account, I wouldn't expect much considering it's a free service with tens of millions more users than Stripe. They're definitely going to get more things wrong.

You can always get your own merchant account. Stripe is about being convenient since they don't due all the diligence of a bank when you sign up for a merchant account.

Re: An account was suspended

#273

Post by insane_dreamer »

1123581321 wrote: post #222
insane_dreamer wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there was some technology that easily allowed people to be notified of certain content only .... RSS, we miss you

He also provides RSS feeds. The Twitter feed is a convenience. Reducing the demand for Twitter notifications is beyond the ability of creators/publishers.

Yeah, it's a shame that social network apps, which have largely supplanted feed reader apps, never integrated RSS feeds into their products

Re: An account was suspended

#274

Post by lapcat »

mschuster91 wrote: post #223
lapcat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still a huge number. Twitter doesn't make enough revenue to hire enough people to do that intelligently.

Then they have to raise money? You can't operate a chemical factory without paying for adequate measures to prevent spewing toxic waste into common resources like air and water, so why should you be allowed to run a facility that spews toxic hate into societies without establishing adequate protection?! If there is one thing that made the internet so toxic, it was services labeled as "free" that in reality were nothi…

> Then they have to raise money?

I think they're trying. ;-)

To be clear, I'm not defending Twitter. If I was in charge, I would actually shut down Twitter for the benefit of the world. My point is just the basic financial fact that Twitter doesn't have enough money to do this, and thus they won't, indeed can't.

Re: An account was suspended

#275

Post by CharlesW »

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…

> Do people seriously think every such case -- an empty days-old account suddenly doing spam-like activity -- should be manually reviewed?

The problem is not that the account triggered an algorithmic tripwire, but that the explanatory copy is a customer-hostile lie. It states in no uncertain terms that the suspension was further "carefully reviewed" to be found correct, and is also permanent. Obviously, it wasn't correct, and wasn't permanent.

I strongly suspect that, if there even was a human in the loop as the copy implies, they simply rubber-stamped the algorithmic flag. This is not necessarily the human's fault if their work is monitored/timed.

Re: An account was suspended

#276

Post by matthewdgreen »

mschuster91 wrote: post #227
JadeNB wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But only a tiny fraction of the 829 M tweets a day are abusive. But you have to read all 829 M to find the abusive ones—and you have to agree on what 'abusive' means.

Rely on users to report the bad apples, ban accounts who abuse the report features, and provide people whose identity has been proven with a government-issued ID card with a safety switch that enforces human moderation for "spam" reports. Right now Twitter isn't doing anything but the first part, which is why "I got mass report banned on Twitter" stories are so commonplace. They need not be, if Twitter would do their…

A major financial criticism of Twitter is that their profits are too low compared to their revenues, mostly because of high salaries. Objectively, they're "doing their goddamn job" too well right now: I doubt a newly debt-laden private Twitter will be able to afford an increase in these human resources.

Re: An account was suspended

#277

Post by CharlesW »

brazzy wrote: post #266
celeritascelery wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is that they're using "permanently suspended" to mean "indefinitely suspended". They could also just say "suspended".

Re: An account was suspended

#278

Post by MikePlacid »

dekhn wrote: post #234
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?

No, that is not political censorship.

cen·sorship /ˈsensərSHip/ noun 1. the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.

Re: An account was suspended

#279

Post by panarky »

rjzzleep wrote: post #258
danso wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It doesn't have to be a lot of links, if you piss off the wrong people and they massreport you you're temporarily out. You can reach out to support, but I don't know that support actually ever responds to any requests. Apparently according to posts on reddit if you add your number to twitter and something happens you won't even be able to ever remove it. Similarly they have weird intransparent policies regarding what…

This episode demonstrates the foolishness of Twitter's prospective new owner.

He promises to allow all speech that is legal under the first amendment to the US constitution, while simultaneously eliminating spam.

That's an instant contradiction, of course, because spam is perfectly legal under the US constitution.

And every attempt to eliminate spam and bots, whether human or automated, will necessarily sweep up many non-spam and non-bot accounts as false positives.

Re: An account was suspended

#280

Post by dekhn »

MikePlacid wrote: post #278
dekhn wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is not political censorship.

cen·sorship /ˈsensərSHip/ noun 1. the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.

thanks for the dictionary definition, Professor Placid
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